Grid Resilience Study in Saint Lucia
Saint Lucia has been experiencing increasingly severe weather systems, largely because of climate change globally. These extreme weather events threaten LUCELEC’s critical infrastructure. LUCELEC understands that the St. Lucian grid is not currently built to resist the strongest of storms (Category 5 and above) and intends to update its grid construction standards and take actions to incrementally improve system resilience so that it is capable of withstanding Atlantic storms, which are expected t increase in severity and frequency due to climate change.
In preparation for these actions, LUCELEC engaged K&M Team to prepare a study that would address the following two major topics:
- Providing a means of measuring current grid resilience and setting annual resilience targets and
- Analyzing the electrical network infrastructure in St. Lucia using inspections, models, and other tools to identify a pipeline of projects to increase the resiliency of the transmission and distribution networks, generation assets, and LUCELEC’s solar farm.
Throughout the study, K&M will develop a reliability metric to track LUCELEC’s progress in improving system resilience. This will involve reviewing and analyzing system data, conducting interviews with LUCELEC’s senior staff, performing a site visit, and identifying a prioritized pipeline of climate resilience projects. The ultimate goal is to enable LUCELEC to develop a specific grid resilience improvement plan.
During the course of the study, K&M developed a reliability metric that would allow LUCELEC to measure their progress in improving system resilience, review and analyze the system data, conduct interviews with LUCELEC’s senior staff, perform a site visit, identify the pipeline of the climate resilience projects, and prioritize the projects to allow LUCELEL to develop a specific grid resilience improvement plan.
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