Italian national resilience plan 2017: For a more reliable grid

Global warming, also referred to as climate change, is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the Earth and its related effects. Many scientific studies show that the climate system is warming. In 2013, the Fifth Assessment Report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”. The largest human influence has been the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Future climate change and associated impacts will differ from region to region around the globe. Negative effects include increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels, changing precipitation, and expansion of deserts in the subtropics. Warming is expected to be greater over the land than over the oceans and greatest in the Arctic, with the continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Other likely changes include more frequent extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall with floods and heavy snowfall, ocean acidification, and species extinctions due to shifting of temperature regimes. Considering the increase in extreme meteorological events related to this global warming, in the absence of preventive actions, climate change is likely to make the national energy infrastructure increasingly vulnerable. Considering this critical situation, the Italian Regulatory Authority for Electricity, Gas and Water System (AEEGSI) asked the Italian TSO (TERNA) and all the DSOs serving a minimum of 50.000 consumers to work jointly for the implementation of the first National Resilience Plan (NRP). In particular, with Article 37 of Annex A of the Deliberation 653/2015/R/eel and with the Resolution 2/2017 — DIEU “Guidelines for Presentation of Work Plans”, the AEEGSI requested that this first NRP should focus on the resilience of the national grid referring to intense ice and snow events of the last 15 years. With a unique transparent process of involving stakeholders¹ at every step, an ad-hoc round table lead by Terna has been launched to discuss in more details practical approaches, to build common position on specific objectives and the methodology. On March 2017, Terna successfully released the first version of the NRP structured as follow: — The first section provides an analysis of the extreme events of the last years that have caused difficulties in the daily operation of the national transmission grid; — The second section presents the definition of the Resilience of the grid; — The third section reports the main different technological solutions for the resilience increase; — Finally, in the last section, it's described how the methodology is applied and which are the technical solution identified by Terna in each critical area.