A Growing Partnership

Climate READi has spawned impactful collaboration between EPRI and national laboratories.

By Chris Warren

As the director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Climate Resilience & Decision Science (CCRDS), Tom Wall devotes a lot of time to translating climate science and data into something society can use. It’s a challenging task. “The output of a climate model is useless to anybody except climate scientists,” Wall said.

Finding ways to make climate science and data usable is particularly important in the utility industry. After all, utilities need to make long-term decisions and investments to harden grids against climate-related extreme weather events and understand how climate change can potentially impact the demand for electricity and the output of thermal and renewable power plants.

Fortunately, Wall and his colleagues have made progress in bridging the understanding gap between climate science and specific utility industry needs. “We’ve gotten really good at both translating that data into something people can use and taking the next step and putting it into power grid models or power system vulnerability analyses,” Wall said.

The growing collaboration of Argonne and the electric power industry is just one example of the research and educational partnership between EPRI and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories as part of Climate READi (REsilience and ADaptation initiative).

Seven Labs are Part of EPRI’s Climate READi Affinity Group (CRAG)

The group brings together representatives from non-governmental organizations, insurance and finance, government and regulatory bodies, and academia to provide expertise and insights to bolster energy sector resilience and adaptation.

The partnership between EPRI and the national labs takes many forms. For example, EPRI has hosted a series of regional Climate READi workshops in collaboration with the laboratories. Each focused on topics that addressed the specific climate hazards the region may be exposed to and leveraged the unique research expertise of the labs. For example, the Southeast Regional Workshop held in April of 2024 with Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory explored the impacts of hurricanes and extreme cold on the power system, as well as the lab’s super computing capabilities and its application to analyzing climate conditions.

This past August, EPRI and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York hosted a workshop at John F. Kennedy International Airport that examined the power system impacts of flooding and cloud development. These two workshops followed the success of the two workshops hosted in 2023 with Argonne and Pacific Northwest National Labs.

Better Together

EPRI and the national laboratories have a powerfully symbiotic relationship.

“The labs have strong scientific and regional capabilities. They’re advancing research that can make a big difference globally, nationally, and in the regions where they are located,” said Morgan Scott, director of Climate READi, sustainability, and ecosystem stewardship at EPRI. “EPRI brings expertise and perspective on practical application for the energy system. By working together, we can get their work into the hands of utility practitioners and accelerate impact.”

The four regional Climate READi workshops provided a unique opportunity to share knowledge, experience, and insight. That was the case at the most recent workshop in New York, which occurred after an August 2024 weekend of torrential storms and flooding in the region. An initial day of training on the principles of climate hazard, exposure, and vulnerability assessment was followed by a series of presentations from experts on the impacts of clouds and flooding on the power system.

This is an area of particular expertise at BNL. “We know more about clouds, aerosols, and storms than most, and they’re a big issue for utilities,” said David Manning, who heads up BNL’s Stakeholders Relations Office. “We are very focused on sharing as much of that understanding with utilities as possible, and the workshop was an opportunity to do that efficiently.”

At the conference, attendees also heard from local New York organizations about their experience preparing for and responding to strong storms, including 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. Con Edison engineer Mike Ragona and Eric Wilson, who leads climate resilience for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), described how Sandy and other storms flooded neighborhoods and subway stations and led to power outages. They also shared plans for maintaining power and transportation during storms, including integrating equipment that can withstand underwater submersion and relocating critical infrastructure.

Attendees also learned about the New York Climate Exchange, a unique hub for policymakers, academics, researchers, industry, and students to collaborate on climate solutions that will be located on Governor’s Island. “BNL was able to introduce EPRI’s membership to this groundbreaking project in terms of the future of climate change study,” said Elspeth McSweeney, Director of the Energy and Photon Science Growth Office at BNL. “There’s a big educational component to it, but research is also a big focus, and it’s something EPRI members should be aware of and potentially participate in.”

While the knowledge sharing possible at Climate READi workshops is valuable, McSweeney notes that the events spawn new opportunities to collaborate.

“We’re now engaging on a much broader level than just Climate READi,” McSweeney said. “We’ve connected on hydrogen, community engagement, and quantum, all really diverse connections.” One of the benefits of working more closely with EPRI is that it provides BNL with connections to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) with which EPRI is already engaged in research.

Original Research

Climate READi has also birthed specific research efforts that combine the unique research capabilities of the national labs and EPRI. For example, in February 2024, EPRI and Argonne released a READi Insights publication about downscaling global climate model outputs.

Historically, global climate models, as their name indicates, simulate the earth’s climate at a global scale. This means that these models, typically run at daily time steps with a coarse spatial resolution of around 100 kilometers, lack granular temporal and spatial resolution relevant to power system modeling. Argonne’s expertise in climate science and modeling helps produce climate models that consider local conditions, which makes them more useful to utilities and other organizations making grid resilience and other decisions. The transformation of coarse data to granular, locally relevant information is known as downscaling.

“Argonne has expertise in climate science and modeling. We combine that supercomputing to run these regional climate models of the future,” Wall said. “We don’t just model the entire globe’s climate. We focus on North America and much smaller spatial domains to do much more detailed modeling.”

This approach also bolsters the local relevance of climate science by layering in many more factors than is the norm. For instance, most climate data is generated through a process called statistical downscaling, which takes data from a global climate model and builds a statistical relationship with historical records of a small number of data points, like rainfall and temperature.

“That’s how you get to estimate local impacts, but it’s only for a couple of variables, and it’s usually only daily values,” Wall said. “We can model 60 different climate variables. I can tell you about future solar irradiance in different parts of the country and wind activity, both of which are relevant to renewable generation. We can also look at changes in extremes, like the combination of temperature and humidity, to look at the heat index. We have a lot of flexibility in projecting unique and relevant climate impact variables into the future.”

Collaborating with EPRI on the publication also helped Argonne educate people who eventually use climate data to make decisions. By developing and distributing the downscaling report, Argonne and EPRI provide an overview of how climate data is made and the different tools needed to produce it. “This makes it accessible in a way that someone at a power utility could understand the data and gain greater confidence in what the data is telling them,” Wall said.

Another Climate READi example of EPRI and a national lab combining expertise is the production of a map showing how hurricane-related power outages may change under different climate scenarios. The work was developed jointly by EPRI and PNNL and combined EPRI’s expertise about the power system and outages with the lab’s understanding of hurricanes.

Climate READi has catalyzed many new and mutually beneficial areas of collaboration between EPRI and the national labs. But these initial engagements are just the beginning of a deeper and more productive partnership.

“As a springboard for future collaboration, Climate READi has already been a wild success, and I hope that type of collaboration will only continue in the future,” Wall said. Wall sees opportunities to produce climate data that more specifically meets the needs of utilities. More generally, he believes the increasingly apparent impacts of climate change will only accelerate the need to work together.

“The industry is going to continue pursuing climate resilience work. They see the financial benefit of it from a capital perspective because the impacts are getting more expensive,” Wall said. “There are so many ways we can combine the expertise of the labs and EPRI to provide value to the industry and society.”

Climate READi will culminate next spring with the publication of the Climate READI: Power Framework, which provides another opportunity to underscore the collaboration of EPRI and the national labs. The framework’s launch event will take place at the Battelle Innovations in Climate Resilience Conference hosted in Washington, DC, April 21-23, 2025.

Battelle is the managing entity of nine national labs, including several CRAG participants. “The Battelle conference is going to be an incredible celebration of three years of hard work, and we are excited to be launching at an event where we can not just announce the finalization of the framework but have three days of important sessions to explore the future of climate resilience solutions,” Scott said. “We look forward to bringing together our Climate READi team, national lab collaborators, member companies, and other CRAG participants in DC to continue the meaningful conversations we’ve been facilitating for the past three years—and will undoubtedly continue to explore together for years to come.”

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