Long-Term Power Grid Planning: Navigating Climate Change and Energy Transition Challenges

Book Chapter in Advancing the Resilience of the Power Grid under a Changing Climate (IEEE & Wiley, 2024).

This chapter presents a comprehensive synthesis of the long-term impacts of climate change on electric power systems, integrating demand growth, supply degradation, extreme weather risk, renewable integration, policy uncertainty, and interdependent infrastructure dynamics into a unified planning perspective.

Unlike conventional studies that treat expansion planning, resilience investment, and decarbonization as separate problems, this work emphasizes their structural interdependence under deep climate uncertainty. The chapter highlights limitations of deterministic planning approaches and argues for adaptive, risk-informed, and uncertainty-aware frameworks capable of navigating nonlinear climate projections and evolving policy environments.

Key contributions include:

• Systematic review of direct and indirect climate impacts on power systems
• Integration of resilience, expansion, and energy transition planning challenges
• Identification of deep uncertainties in extreme event projections and renewable performance
• Framework-level recommendations for adaptive long-term grid planning

This work received the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Synthesis Award ($10,000) in recognition of its contribution to advancing interdisciplinary climate-resilient power grid planning.

Themes: Climate uncertainty, long-term energy planning, resilience, renewable integration, adaptive planning, interdependent infrastructure