Impact of climate change on network components: Root Cause Analysis of overhead distribution network failures due to heavy Snowfall- a Case Study Gilan, Iran, Feb. 2020

Climate change has inflicted many damages to our planet. Among these damages, harsh weather conditions such as storms, heavy snowfalls are quite catastrophic. They have sometimes become unpredictable as well as posing great damages to everything such as overhead lines. In the absence of preventive actions, our network infrastructure could become extremely vulnerable. Snowfall phenomenon is a High Impact Low Probability (HILP) contingency, which causes moderate risk. A heavy snowfall which occurred in Rasht, Gilan province, Iran, February 2020, was investigated by a technical committee in Tavanir Company. It was a very devastating accident; many outages (about 90,000 consumers) were announced in 194 villages of this province. The main power outage was due to failure of equipment and overhead line's inappropriate mechanical design strategies.In this paper, main causes of network weak points, which resulted in this huge destruction and blackout, are carefully determined. Effective solutions for minimizing weak points in two parts of electrical networks (LV, MV) are developed. Then, applying Root Cause Analysis method (RCA) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model, a pattern is presented that increases resiliency of the network against heavy snow.