An Approach for Justifying and Prioritizing Adaptation Investments for Climate Resilience

Justifying and prioritizing investments to improve power system climate resilience is challenging due to long time frames, deep uncertainties, interdependencies across systems, and competing objectives. Decision-makers need practical guidance on how to account for these factors to confidently determine whether adaptations are needed and if so, which adaptation strategies are cost effective while still achieving the desired level of performance. This paper provides an overview of methods to compare and evaluate adaptation decisions, focusing on the assessment of robustness of decisions through sensitivity analysis. A synthetic case study of an electric power distribution system is used to demonstrate this approach, highlighting the tradeoffs present when considering high wind events, the…