Preparing for a Changing Landscape
Nashville has faced various extreme weather in recent history, including heat waves, flooding and tornadoes. This can impact vital services and utilities, such as electrical outages across the city. These events at best, interrupt the lives of residents and at worst, can result in risk to health and property. With the increasing likelihood of outages from extreme weather events, cities like Nashville work tirelessly to adapt and prepare for the ever-changing landscape of disasters, emergencies, and the unexpected.
Nearly 700,000 Without Power
RUNWITHIT Synthetics, in collaboration with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) utilized Synthetic Modelling in a pilot project to inform organizational intelligence, help build community resilience and mitigate risk.
We used our modelling and a version of Synthetic Nashville to de-risk and dial forward this emergency preparedness scenario: an unprecedented cold snap, and how it would affect the systems and the 680K+ residents of Nashville as temperatures fell and energy demand rose, resulting in a wide-scale power failure.
A staggering number of data points go into a synthetic model like this, everything from the extent to which aging infrastructure could keep people warm to the very human needs immediately following the outage in the first 24 hours; the first 72 hours; and a full week.
We forecast the impact of this extreme weather event on people, utilities, infrastructure, and the potential benefits of distributed energy resource (DER) deployments. It also had a specific sub-focus on how vulnerable populations would be affected by both the outage and the weather event.
Key Findings
Utilizing Synthetic Modelling, we were able to visualize and present a wealth of key findings to stakeholders. This included zones of amplified need, based on economic health and mobility vulnerabilities. Existing support facilities within those zones were also mapped to highlight the inequity of needs-to-support services. Our findings also quantified and located different areas of electricity demand, which could be used to plan the location of DERs. We also created risk indices, showing where people had the highest energy needs and clusters with vital and acute needs.
People are at the heart of everything we do, so RWI Synthetics uses modelling to build resilience and model outcomes for the safety, equity and resilience of people and communities worldwide.
