K&M was engaged by the World Bank to assess the impact of extreme weather events on St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Antigua and Barbuda. This is part of a series of World Bank initiatives to improve the Caribbean islands’ resilience to extreme weather events. K&M is the prime contractor, and POWER Engineers is the subcontractor.
K&M performed assessments of the past two extreme weather events on the power systems of the Caribbean islands listed above, identifying risks and vulnerabilities, recommending energy resilience measures for generation assets and T&D systems, and developing an investment plan to undertake the measures. K&M first collected data on the islands’ power systems, and then analyzed extreme weather events’ impacts. The assessments involved interviewing the islands’ utilities (undertaken by POWER) and evaluating prior power system vulnerability studies. Under the direction of K&M, POWER conducted physical and engineering inspections of the most vulnerable power system assets identified by the utility personnel, and a reliability and criticality assessment. The reliability and criticality assessment involved the following tasks: analyzing system reliability, identifying elements that could cause power service interruption, identifying substation and T&D locations subject to flooding, and understanding system performance under contingencies by reviewing T&D system studies.