Climate-aware capacity expansion planning for power grids exposed to heat waves

Climate change influences weather, with particular concern around rising temperatures, which in turn affect electric power supply and demand. These impacts require consideration of evolving weather patterns in power system planning. In addition to rising temperatures, extreme weather events, such as heat waves, drive even higher demand and have the potential to reduce available supply, making it significantly more challenging to satisfy the demand. Hence, long-term power system planning approaches may benefit from the inclusion of these extreme heat events. Capacity expansion planning is used to understand system changes needed to maintain a reliable grid against future demands and regulations. It can be used to plan for a future grid topology that is reliable under normal conditions during a future climate, and resilient in heat waves, expected to be more severe with a changing climate. In this paper, we integrate climate change effects on the power system into capacity expansion planning to consider resilience. We analyze the impact of climate change on capacity expansion decisions, considering its effects in both normal and extreme heat conditions. We account for projected demand growth due to population increases and electrification, as well as hourly and seasonal variations in supply and demand due to weather conditions. We consider two mathematical models: one for climate-aware capacity expansion planning, and one for the evaluation of the decisions of the planning model. We conduct our analysis considering two SSP (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways)-RCP (Representative Concentration Pathways) combinations, SSP1-RCP2.6 (SSP126) and SSP3-RCP7.0 (SSP370), representing optimistic and upper-middle emissions scenarios, respectively, and compare them against a case with no climate change. We test our proposed formulation on a synthetic test system representative of the Texas grid, compare the expansion needs across various climate change scenarios, and examine the differences in optimal expansion strategies. Our findings show that incorporating climate change into capacity expansion planning can significantly reduce load shedding during heat waves, with only a slight increase in expansion costs. Hence, our results suggest that planning under the severe climate change scenario may represent an effective strategy.