Dr Mathaios Panteli, Assistant Professor at University of Cyprus, Dr Matthias Noebels, Ph.D. researcher at the University of Manchester and Mr Jan Vorrink, head of the Control Centres Netherlands of TenneT TSO BV (the Dutch Transmission System Operator), shared their insights on the impact of COVID-19 on electrical power systems through an online webinar on 29th March 2021.
The event is attended by Mr Harish Krishnappa, Chair of CIGRE Netherlands NGN, Dr Luis Hurtado, member of CIGRE Netherlands NGN, Process Specialist at TenneT, Dr. Ying Xue, Chair of CIGRE UK NGN, Assistant Professor in Electrical Power Networks at the University of Birmingham, Dr Melike Selcen Ayaz, event lead at CIGRE UK NGN, Energy Consultant at RINA TECH UK and Ms. Jingyi Wan, UK representative of NGN International Executive Committee and Marketing Lead at CIGRE UK NGN, HV Cable Systems Project Engineer at Mott MacDonald. There were over 50 people attending the event.
The webinar is organised by the CIGRE UK & Netherlands NGN, Chaired by Lakshna Kalpoe, Member of CIGRE Netherlands NGN, Junior Engineer at TenneT, and hosted by the TenneT’s Webex platform.
At the start of the event, Lakshna provided an opening remark and welcomed all the attendees.
Melike gave an introduction to the UK NGN, highlighting its past events, young member showcase and mentoring scheme.
Luis gave an introduction to the Netherlands NGN, its past events and CIGRE NL themes for 2020/21.
Mathaios first introduced the growing need for resilience, the concept of high-impact low-probability event and the resilience definition from CIGRE WG C4.47. Following that, he pointed out the importance of organizational resilience, in addition to infrastructure and operational resilience.
Matthias then presented a data-driven resilience assessment method of the UK electricity network during COVID-19 using publicly available outage data, highlighting correlations with demand levels, various social metrics and geographical locations. He pointed out the importance of resilience-driven investment.
Following Matthias, Mathaios highlighted the importance of considering community resilience in a move from energy trilemma to energy quadrilemma. He concluded by pointing out the need for data-driven approaches and importance of resilience-driven investment.
Jan started off his presentation with a brief introduction to Tennet. He pointed out a number of important impacts on electricity system from COVID-19 such as decreased of load, occasionally very low prices when PV/Wind have high production and voltage/inertia problems. He then shared a number of measures that were taken by Tennet to mitigate these impacts and its press release. After that, Jan explained in detail an example of COPA team risk assessments, causal chains of grid operation and monitoring factors in case scenarios materialise.
During the panel discussion, the three presenters took a number of questions such as the cyber security during remote working, what are the key lessons learnt from COVID-19 and the impacts of COVID-19 on the economy of power system.