North American Forecasting Model: Outage, Damage and Load Resilience

A Scalable “MEGAPROJECT” for National Resilience:

PI: Diego Cerrai (UConn)

Co-PIs:

Marina Astitha, E. Anagnostou, D. Song (UConn);

Jeffrey Freedman, Sukanta Basu (Albany)

What’s Driving the Economy This Week?

Affordability for Ratepayers: Every hour saved in storm restoration translates to millions of dollars in avoided economic loss for New York businesses. WISER’s integration with the NYS Mesonet provides high-resolution data that allows utilities to "pre-stage" crews with surgical precision, directly lowering the O&M costs that impact rate cases. This cost avoidance focus has driven the North American Forecasting Initiative, which will pool North American energy company data sets and capabilities, a first in the nation and perhaps the world. NYSERDA is one of the visionaries for this initiative, summarized as follows:

Industrial Relevance

Storm outages increase financial risks & undermine reliability. Current prediction gaps lead to inefficient resource allocation.

Phased Roadmap

The Proposal for Phase 1 is currently on a 24-month plan per its deliverables.

Phase 1: Local

(Years 1-2)

ISO-NE, NYISO, CAISO. Operational OPM Pilot

Technical Approach