For many coastal regions, avoiding hurricanes is impossible. But avoiding catastrophic power failures needn’t be.
Princeton researchers Ning Lin *10 and Luo Xu are working with power companies and governments to understand and prevent cascading power outages that frequently follow severe coastal storms. In one effort, the researchers are consulting with Puerto Rico’s energy operator, LUMA, to strengthen the island’s power grid.
Puerto Rico has been repeatedly storm-battered this decade, and during 2022’s Hurricane Fiona, LUMA collected high-resolution records of outage times for the entire island, showing when different transmission and distribution nodes failed. The researchers used the data to create models, evaluating the failures and pointing to preventative upgrades.
Lin, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, is an expert on simulating hurricanes under future climate scenarios. Her team’s techniques can project location-specific probabilities of hazards such as wind, rain, and storm surge. The project’s co-principal investigator, electrical and computer engineering professor H. Vincent Poor *77, brings deep knowledge of network science to the study of energy systems.
Xu, a postdoctoral researcher, is combining hazard projections with new power grid models, aiming to predict which parts of the grid will be most vulnerable and inform planning by LUMA and energy regulators.
The researchers are also advising Puerto Rico on integrating renewable energy into the grid. The island has committed to using 100% renewable energy by 2050. But moving from a fossil fuel-based system to a renewable one requires careful planning and new energy storage components.
“We are moving towards net-zero to mitigate climate change,” said Xu. “But we cannot reverse climate change immediately. Integrating more renewables makes the grid more sensitive to climate [hazards]. We call this superimposed risk.”
Lin believes that the methods her team is developing in Puerto Rico could be adapted to serve other coastal regions. As a co-principal investigator for the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, a National Science Foundation-funded consortium, she hopes to apply lessons from Puerto Rico to grid resilience in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York City.
