Session: Session 2. Asset Integrity Under Extreme and Disruptive Events

Paper Number: 108756

108756 - Combining Asset Integrity Management and Resilience in Coping With Extreme Climate Events in Electrical Power Grids 

Contemporary electrical utilities are part of the critical national infrastructure and function in a complex business and operational environment composed of closely interdependent systems. They are also complex by their internal structure, management and deployed modern technologies. As the complexity and interdependencies increase, electrical power grids face situations that create conditions for cascading, system-level failures. They have potential to cause serious threats to both themselves and society in general. System failures can occur because of multiple causes such as a) serious physical damages and destruction of their physical assets (caused by natural disasters, extreme weather phenomena and climate change, malicious human actions, premature major failures of assets, etc.), and/or b) large functional disruptions with no physical damages of assets (caused by major organization’s internal disturbances, cyber attacks, market crashes, pandemics, disruptions of supply chains, etc.).

The cases of the COVID-19 pandemic or the armed conflict in Ukraine demonstrate convincingly that the organizations need to think, plan and act globally to deal with such situations that will also likely take place in the future. Thus, they should find ways of coping with this reality to remain economically viable. We are of opinion that the concepts of structured Asset Management (AM), the Asset Integrity Management (AIM) and resilience put together in a meaningful way may provide an efficient framework in this regard.

The present case study focuses on the evaluation, by a major North American electrical utility (Hydro-Québec), of the robustness and resilience of its transmission and distribution grids when facing a major ice storm in a large urban area to demonstrate the applicability of this approach. The analysis involves experts from numerous fields of expertise: transmission and distribution line design, planning and operation of the grid, IT, risk and resilience analysis, emergency measures, telecommunication, etc. A collaboration/consultation with external stakeholders such as municipality level public safety experts has also been carried out to better asses the extent of the potential societal impacts.

The specific characteristics of the methodology and their impact on the analysis are also argued. Therefore, the discussion is focused on the concept of a transdisciplinary approach, the inclusion of the interrelationship and impacts on critical infrastructure and populations, the stakes of an ethical deliberation process. The influence of these factors on the decision-making process for mitigating the risk and the complementarity with internal and external emergency measures in line with the residual risk are described as well.

Outcomes of the study serve to increase both enterprise wide as well as public safety organisational awareness level, but also allow to identify further potential improvements through optimal allocation of investments.

Presenting Author: Marc Morissette Hydro-Quebec

Presenting Author Biography: Marc Morissette received his BSc at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1994. He works as a senior Transmission Planner for the Ultra-High Voltage (UHV) transmission system planning department at Hydro-Quebec (HQ). He oversees the “High Voltage transmission system extreme weather prevention and security” strategy and acts as a subject matter expert for the physical security of HQ’s facilities. He also cumulates close to 20 years has a technical engineer in Automation, Protection and Control and software development, where one significant power plant Automation project he developed, was published and presented at the Sacramento, CA, Hydro-Vision conference in 2008.
He currently chairs the Task Force on System Studies (TFSS) at the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC).
Marc has the status of professional engineer in the province of Quebec, Canada.