Improving Resilience to Natural Hazards with Distributed Energy Resources and Telemetry Data

With climate change, the traditional large-scale power systems have been increasingly facing the occurrence of high impact events and their consequences. The deployment of distributed energy resources (DERs) is usually presented as a strategy to cope with grid outages and to provide resilience of power supply. Such systems have embedded communication devices to monitor the performance and condition of their components. In the case of grid-connected DERs, they can also measure the parameters of the electricity network at their location. This study focuses on the information that can be retrieved and leveraged from these resources in the aftermath of a natural disaster. It aims at characterizing, from a geospatial and temporal perspective, the disruption faced by the grid and the restoration process that follows. An approach to visualize and quantify grid outages is presented and helps identifying the most affected areas. It is applied to Cyclone Gabrielle, that impacted several electricity stakeholders in New Zealand in February 2023.