Forecasting (May 2020)

Dynamic Modeling of Power Outages Caused by Thunderstorms

  • Berk A. Alpay,
  • David Wanik,
  • Peter Watson,
  • Diego Cerrai,
  • Guannan Liang,
  • Emmanouil Anagnostou

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/forecast2020008
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2, no. 2
pp. 151 – 162

Abstract

Read online

Thunderstorms are complex weather phenomena that cause substantial power outages in a short period. This makes thunderstorm outage prediction challenging using eventwise outage prediction models (OPMs), which summarize the storm dynamics over the entire course of the storm into a limited number of parameters. We developed a new, temporally sensitive outage prediction framework designed for models to learn the hourly dynamics of thunderstorm-caused outages directly from weather forecasts. Validation of several models built on this hour-by-hour prediction framework and comparison with a baseline model show abilities to accurately report temporal and storm-wide outage characteristics, which are vital for planning utility responses to storm-caused power grid damage.

Keywords