HEADOUT Puerto Rico
Overview
Tropical cyclones can cause widespread equipment damage, resulting in power outages that often last for days. Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) developed a tool for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) called HEADOUT (Hurricane Electrical Assessment Damage Outage) that performs quick turnaround analysis of the probable impacts to the electric sector from tropical cyclones and thus assists in projecting response to needs for electric infrastructure restoration.
Significant improvements were made to the existing HEADOUT tool to estimate electric outages at a more detailed level and to include new methodologies for estimating customer outages and impacts on the bulk power grid. The intent of the enhanced
Figure: Hurricane Maria, courtesy of NOAA
new prototype tool is to be able to produce estimations of the potential number of customers that will experience a loss of electrical power and to predict generation and transmission impacts. The hurricane-related hazards or effects considered in the prototype tool include extreme wind loads, wind pressure, wind-borne debris missiles, tree blowdown, rainfall, and storm surge.
The new tool’s architecture and framework improve the accuracy and granularity of the electric outage forecasts for tropical cyclone events. The tool uses data inputs from the National Hurricane Center (NHC)—with simulations run as the NHC provides 3-hour updates for an approaching tropical cyclone. Using NHC data, the web-based application of the model provides the forecasted electric outages and identifies at-risk infrastructure on a repeatable and consistent basis as the NHC routinely issues its advisories
The following is preliminary estimates of the potential peak numbers of electrical customer outages predicted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. The estimate is for awareness only and based on forecasts from the National Hurricane Center. This estimate is not intended for public release unless otherwise approved by DOE.
Note: The predictive model only estimates peak customer outages within the projected 72 hour wind-swath and may not account for all variables.
