REGEN · REsilience of Global Electricity Networks in a changing climate

Climate hazards pose severe threats to the ever-increasing interconnection of power networks across borders. Research has focused on climate risks to electricity infrastructure at local or national scales, and thus has not captured the spread of power failures across borders and their ripple effects in the global economy. To identify vulnerable locations and prioritise adaptation investment, it remains a key task to take a global perspective to quantify the vulnerability of power networks to climate hazards. Two challenges remain for scaling up the risk analysis to a global scale: 1) the complexity of modelling power network interconnectivity and failure cascades at very large scales; 2) the difficulty in quantifying losses across economies while considering economic agents’ flexibility in responding to supply and demand fluctuations. REGEN proposes to combine interdisciplinary expertise from academic and non-academic sectors to address above challenges and assess the resilience of global power networks in a changing climate. The objectives are: 1) to simulate power network connectivity and the cross-border propagation of failures due to climate hazards; 2) to develop a new version of the agent-based model Acclimate to assess the wider economic and supply chain impacts of power failures; 3) to assess costs and benefits of adaptation solutions, and develop results into a framework to inform regulatory, investment and engineering decision-making. The project will be primarily conducted at the University of Oxford and supervised by Prof. Jim Hall FREng. Open-access vulnerability maps/datasets and open-source software developed in this project will contribute to EU’s power interconnection target of 15% by 2030 and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG7 and SDG9). Through this project, the candidate expects to build interdisciplinary networks and achieve the applied impact of his research, which will enhance his career prospects of leading a world-class research group.