An Environmental Metric for Vulnerability Assessment of Overhead Power Lines to Extreme Weather Events

Extreme weather events, driven by climate change, are causing widespread, long-duration power outages with significant societal and infrastructural impacts. This paper presents a two-dimensional metric for quantifying the vulnerability of overhead power lines by integrating meteorological and geographical factors. Vulnerability scores are calculated for each dimension using the L2 norm of the main principal components of the data, then aggregated through Pareto ranking to determine the overall vulnerability of overhead lines. The framework was validated through a case study within the Connexus Energy service area, demonstrating alignment between computed vulnerability scores and historical outage data. This methodology provides utilities with a practical tool for enhancing power grid resilience by identifying the best candidate lines for targeted mitigation strategies.