Sponsor: Co-sponsored by IEEE Task Force on Internet of Things for Power Systems
Speaker: Shay Bahramirad, Vice President of Climate and Resilience at Quanta Technology

Meeting Date: August 18, 2021
Time: 12PM
Cost:
Reservations: IEEE

Summary:
Climate change is increasingly threatening the electric power system and causing major disruptions, through more severe and frequent weather events. Disruptions to the electrical infrastructure propagate to other critical sectors causing a domino effect, along with health and community impacts. Climate change directly impacts the electric power system; record-breaking temperatures cause demand surges and contingencies beyond estimations and distribution substations are highly vulnerable to flooding. These threats are compounded in the face of aging infrastructure.

In addition to mitigation strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, developing resiliency planning frameworks to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of severe events on the functions of the electric grid is necessary. Today, there is no widely accepted metrics in the industry to measure resilience, as opposed to reliability. This is complicated by the fact that there is no “one-size-fits-all” frameworks and metrics for resilience, as they depend on regional and functional factors. Therefore, there is a need for risk assessment based robust resilience metrics and methods that should enable benchmarking across the industry and facilitate continuous improvement, and quantify risk to guide investment prioritization decisions. Increasing frequency of events make it inevitable for resiliency planning frameworks to become a part of coordinated planning functions in the electricity sector and investment prioritization frameworks including generation, transmission, and distribution. Coordinated planning functions that include resilience is even more important since not only the climate change and its impacts are evolving, but also the grid is undergoing a paradigm shift toward a more sustainable and renewable future with emerging solutions such as Microgrids and distributed energy resources. To conclude, a resilient infrastructure is the building block of incorporating renewables and emerging technologies into the grid.

Bio: Shay Bahramirad is the Vice President of Climate and Resilience at Quanta Technology. She is responsible for assisting cities and utilities with climate change risk assessments for their assets, operations, and services and for developing mitigation strategies and investment strategies for adapting to climate change.

Dr. Bahramirad has held several positions in the Energy Sector, including Vice President of Engineering and Smart Grid at ComEd: the electric utility in Illinois. In these roles, she has overseen and/or executed “grid of the future” visions, technical roadmaps, analytical frameworks, and investment strategies of distribution system and communication network; Fiber. She has also been responsible for system reliability, DER integration, grid strategy and analytics, standards, maintenance inspection, emerging technologies, STEM programming, and reimagining the power grid to mitigate and adapt to climate change. She has also developed talent strategies, industry engagement plans, and advocacy programs to support business objectives. She has been the expert witness and testified on several state and federal regulatory proceedings around microgrids, energy storage, investment strategies, and Distributed generation interconnection; 1547.