Grid Analysis and Design for Energy and Infrastructure Resiliency for New Orleans

his project was developed to help identify a set of cost-effective options for enhancing the resilience of grid operations and the community of New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA). The project will be executed in the form of several major tasks, including:

• Infrastructure Impact Modeling and Analysis: the team will identify a set of extreme weather-related threat scenarios (e.g., hurricanes, flooding, etc.) and leverage infrastructure models to identify magnitude, duration, and location of power outages and the associated consequences to critical infrastructure and community operations.
• Resilient Power Distribution Modeling and Analysis: the team will use the infrastructure impact analysis to identify grid performance and resilience goals (e.g., load requirements by location, time duration estimates for operation, etc.). These goals will inform the development of a first set of options for enhancing grid resilience, including advanced Smart Grid technologies and microgrids that utilize modern communication and energy management and control technologies to improve demand/response opportunities.
• Integration of Distributed, Renewable, Energy Storage, and Energy Efficiency Options: the team will explore various options to increase energy resiliency by the addition of renewables, local distributed generation, energy storage, and increased energy efficiency integration. The impact of implementing these options within NOLA will be a decreased dependency on power transmission that can be often impacted be extreme weather events such as hurricanes. This will improve community resiliency.
• Cost/Benefit Analysis: the team will evaluate the costs and benefits of the grid resilience enhancement options and opportunities for use of transactional control benefits between the microgrids and distributed generation and the grid to reduce energy costs. Benefits will not only consider improvements in grid operations and the impact to the dependent infrastructure during disaster scenarios but also during nominal operations.

The immediate outcome of this project will be NOLA, Entergy, and relevant stakeholders will have a set of risk-informed, cost-effectiveness recommendations for grid resilience enhancement. These recommendations will be delivered in the form of conceptual designs that can then be utilized by NOLA, Entergy, and state and federal agencies to rank energy infrastructure improvement options and set improvement implementation and funding priorities.