Weathering the Storm

Extreme weather events can devastate utility infrastructure. This panel on Weathering the Storm (Resilience and Extreme Weather) at Canada's prestigious energy regulatory conference CAMPUT 2025 discussed resilient, cost-effective strategies for safeguarding energy systems while exploring critical questions on responsibility and costs in the face of extreme weather.

On the panel were Moderator and Electricity Canada CEO Francis Bradley, EPRI Climate READi Senior Team Leader Anna Lafoyiannis, FortisBC EVP of Operations & Engineering Doyle Sam, and Nova Scotia Power Director of Enterprise Asset Management Jonathan MacIntosh. Enjoy these excerpts.

Moderator and Electricity Canada CEO Francis Bradley: We're going to be talking about extreme weather events. We've had to change how we talk about weather because the frequency and severity of weather events has increased at such a pace that we need a new lexicon to describe some of these things: derecho, thunder snow, firestorm, atmospheric rivers, atmospheric lake, bomb cyclones, and firenado.

The one we hear more in Europe than here but is gaining ground, is dunkelflaute, which is German, and sometimes referred to as an anti-cyclonic gloom. But that we must create new words because the weather is getting so extreme is indicative of how serious this is.

I always point to the response when talking about storms and extreme weather, and how mutual assistance is so baked into the DNA of the electricity sector. It goes beyond the electricity sector.

I thought it was fascinating that just as the tariff war began to ramp up earlier this year, at the same time, we had wonderful images of Canadian water bombers in California helping them. Despite what may happen politically, and again during the tariff war, we had crews going back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border for mutual assistance purposes.

Nova Scotia Power Director of Enterprise Asset Management Jonathan MacIntosh: Extreme weather is here, and we have deployed climate adaptation plans since before 2020, but we're formalizing that. Nova Scotia is the chin of Canada, and we take the hit.

We must understand what those weather factors are that are causing impacts to critical infrastructure, and make sure we take those risks and map them to critical infrastructure. That's what climate adaptation planning is all about; knowing what your risks are today and how they go into the future.

There's been work through Electricity Canada that we were part of, developing the framework for climate adaptation planning, but you need a way to organize all this information. It's hundreds of assets. Lots of weather models but a system is needed to integrate those risks into decision making. Because you need to prioritize those weather and resiliency risks against all those other things you've got to do as a utility.

The biggest challenge with climate adaptation planning that we see in the industry is utilities or companies that maybe don't have a risk framework on how they can embed climate risks into their overall decision making. When we went through that process, that was one of the biggest impacts.

At Nova Scotia Power, we leverage the same framework we utilize with our board, which is the capital execution justification criteria, which has a risk matrix embedded in that, to prioritize projects based on asset risks, and how climate impacts those risks.

The weather is going to get worse. Mitigation measures must be developed for those risks of today and in the future, model that. We have done a lot of work to have these specific models for over twenty-five weather factors that we utilize to develop those adaptation measures.

There are three main points: Understand the climate today and in the future, climate intelligence; make sure you've got a decision-making framework you can integrate that into decision making; and a feedback loop.

FortisBC EVP of Operations & Engineering Doyle Sam: For climate change risk assessment, we built on good work that our sister company, Maritime Electric, had done. Coming up with a formal risk assessment framework and it's a framework from PDAC that gives operators and owners some insight into how their assets are going to interact with the climate hazards.

We looked at twenty-one different asset categories from liquified natural gas compressor stations, pipelines, substations, overhead transmission lines, hydro generation facilities, and more. We looked at nine climate hazards, from wildfires, freeze, thaw, snow, precipitation, floods.

We then had some help to mirror some probabilities and consequences. We looked at any negative consequences that could come from that interaction. Then we modeled that against some of the climate conditions.

However, there are a lot of competing interests that need to be balanced when it comes to an adaption strategy, and one of those is time. How much time do you want to take to roll out that adaption strategy to manage that risk?

The last one is customer rate increases. This electrification agenda, the natural gas growth, are all going to cost money. Adaption strategies are going to cost money, as well. Would I like to relocate all our pressure stations to a higher location to avoid the flood risk?

I'd love to do that, but that costs money. There's no added revenue coming from new customers to do that. Would I like to have steel poles instead of aluminum poles? Absolutely. Would I like them underground? Absolutely, but that comes with a cost.

EPRI Climate READi Senior Team Leader Anna Lafoyiannis: If you talk to a power system planner, which I am, and asked me five years ago what's the difference between weather and climate, I'd be like, "I don't know." What climate model do you use? I don't know.

We made a serious effort on climate literacy. All that is published online, so you can download it. You can watch our videos on this, so you have climate literacy. We went to a number of the utility companies and developed that, which helped them to understand, okay, so these are what these climate models are telling me. This is where I can get data. Also, where the data is not that great; as what data I should use is equally as important.

I understand the climate. I need to understand how my assets experience that climate. It's not just knowing what hazards I face, but where am I vulnerable? We published our vulnerability assessments looking at each of your assets and understanding, are they already hardened? If they are already above ground, how are they impacted? If they're below ground, how are they impacted? We're going through that methodically.

The hard part, when we know what the climate adaptations are, is prioritizing. Figuring out how to model it is a hard part. The hardest part for us was coming up with the decision-making criteria to do this, so we developed specific guidance on how to prioritize. The ultimate goal here is to have one method that can be used across the globe, so you're not looking and seeing California is doing it one way, so why are you doing it differently in Ontario, why are you doing it differently in B.C.?

We wanted to make sure that the framework was common across the board but could be applied differently in each area, and I'm happy to say that we've accomplished that. That's going to be your guide. If I'm a system operator, what do I need to do? If I'm a utility, what do I need to know? If I'm a regulator, what do I need to know?

We just published our first paper on distribution resilience metrics. That has been the number one question we have heard is, how do I measure performance? We don't want to be gold plating the system, so we need to have good decision making.

Moderator Francis Bradley: To what degree do you consider the rate impact at the front end of this process, or do you just go through the entire process and then see what happens to rates?

Doyle Sam: I think it's a little bit more the latter, but not quite. We like to focus on the high extremes to provide focus on all of our assets. Now we focus on, there are three or four asset categories, so narrowed it. That's phase one of the exercise.

Now the exercise is to look at that, come down to an asset level perspective, and see what additional work we need to do. For example, on flooding, we're working with BC Hydro and other players in B.C., and updating the flood inundation maps for all the rivers. It's just the start of the process that we're looking at, to start to focus.

We also did the modeling on the intermediate emissions scenario. What's interesting, the modeling showed, and I know it's assumption rich but it's the best we have, is that there's not a lot of difference between the intermediate scenario and the higher emissions scenario until you get to 2070. So, it's 2070 when those two models really start to diverge. What we have are two scenarios that show it's the next thirty to forty years that we need to focus on.

Jonathan MacIntosh: Our responsibility as a utility is to demonstrate what is required to mitigate those risks. Documenting that, sharing that information with our stakeholders to say this is what needs to be done to get to that standard you want to achieve. 

It's not just up to the utility to balance that affordability. We need to work as a team to manage that affordability. But we're very conscious about Nova Scotia. If you look at the rates of energy poverty in this province, they are high. 

It's important that you manage that to deliver to the customer what our performance-based standards are today, and deliver on that first and foremost, because that's what we are legislated in our policy to do. But longer-term impacts of affordability, that's a bigger conversation.

Moderator Francis Bradley: Anna, EPRI has been building a community in this space, what is getting people's attention, their buy-in, and commitments?

Anna Lafoyiannis: The first part is having that peer network. When we set out, many of the people were focusing on climate adaptation in their companies, but there was this one person doing it as a side gig. Having buy-in also means having buy-in from your peers. 

When Con Edison tried to do it, they did a slow build. Can I recreate that at my company? How do I do that? That was one part.

But another one that was interesting on the buy-in, taking that first step. Nova Scotia, looking at your governance, at your existing processes, and saying this doesn't have to be dramatically different from your processes. 

We did not build any new tools, for example, to do this. You don't have to buy brand new software. We built one different tool and open sourced it. So, that is just a small change in the way you work.

That has helped with a lot of buy-in. When we then tested it out, worked together with an organization and went through all their documentation, all their processes and said, "Here are the spots that you can do a climate adaptation. These are the risks if you do this, and if you don't. Work with your executives to do this and to get that buy-in, so that they know exactly what they need to do in this work."

Doyle Sam: Customers are asking what we're doing on climate, so just the whole climate awareness. All our customers are stakeholders and they're asking questions. Our shareholders and financial regulators are asking questions about what we're doing around it.

How are we going to maintain the current levels of reliability that customers have come to enjoy, when we look at some of these events that are happening? No pushbacks on support.

Any plans that we produce will be with financial regulators for support on that, and buy-in. It's totally different from what it was even ten years ago. We had wildfires ten to twenty years ago, but clearly there's a lot more interest from our stakeholders, customers, indigenous groups.

The insurance markets are much more interested in how utilities are managing risk, so that's another avenue. But yes, it's easier to have these conversations because people are feeling it's real.

Moderator Francis Bradley: What about the regulators? At BCUC, they've all modeled on this and if you can show its about climate adaptation, it will move forward.

Jonathan MacIntosh: I wouldn't go quite there.

We've been engaging the British Columbia Utilities Commission, in what we're doing about our climate change risk assessment. We've committed that in our next filing, in a year or two, we're going to come into a more formal plan.

We'll be looking for endorsement. Is this reasonable? Is this the appropriate amount of risk mitigation? We'll start to think through the financial aspects. But we're working with the BCUC on what we're doing, same thing with our peer BC Hydro, and engaged with them on what we're doing and what they're doing as well.

Moderator Francis Bradley: How will climate adaptation rank on your list of all these priorities, and how do you help customers understand the importance of this work when our systems are reliable?

Doyle Sam: It's about having a framework to make those decisions, because you must normalize risk in your organization. You're going to have a lot of our loud voices but if you don't have a framework for how to prioritize what is the highest risk in your organization, you're going to have a challenge prioritizing the climate adaptation. That's the foundational piece.

Moderator Francis Bradley: Jonathan, your presentation was about how we measure and assess this risk versus others. Is it a challenge to have those conversations within the company?

Jonathan MacIntosh: I'm the guy that has the department that must respond to these emergencies, so I'm going to suggest that climate adaptation trumps everything else. Maybe except for cybersecurity.

Climate mitigation is a longer-term initiative. Even if you could shut off the greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, these events are still going to happen. So, we must adapt to these events, regardless, for the foreseeable future.

Do we need to do it with climate mitigation? Absolutely. Do we need to reduce our greenhouse gases? Absolutely. Do we need to focus on energy security and reliability? Absolutely.

We must do that, but that takes time. From an operations perspective, we're going to continue to see these events, with the greenhouse gases that are already here.

Lead image: Panel on Weathering the Storm (Resilience and Extreme Weather), from left, Moderator and Electricity Canada CEO Francis Bradley, Nova Scotia Power Director of Enterprise Asset Management Jonathan MacIntosh, FortisBC EVP of Operations & Engineering Doyle Sam, and EPRI Climate READi Senior Team Leader Anna Lafoyiannis.

CAMPUT articles at fortnightly.com:

• Natural Gas Risk and Uncertainty
• Weathering the Storm