Brief communication: Evidence of the impacts of climate extremes on power system outages in India

Abstract. Electricity systems are prone to climate extremes such as heatwaves and cold spells, precipitation, high winds, and flood inundation. Yet, the impacts of these climate extremes on the provision of electricity is scarce, in particular in the Global South context. Here, we combine four years of daily electricity outages data from 370 locations across India with temperature, wind, precipitation and flood inundation data to provide empirical evidence of their impacts of the electricity system. We find that outages minutes can increase 20–70 % during days with high wind speed (>50 m/s), 80–220 % during days of intense precipitation (>40 mm/day), and around 15–60 % during heatwaves (>40 degrees Celsius). In terms of flooding, we find that severe flood inundation in urban areas can increase daily outage minutes with a factor 2.1 to 5.5. Our findings highlight how high frequency data can help empirically validate how climate extremes can affect essential services to customers, and how these impacts differ across types of locations. This information is key for those countries that aim to meet universal access to energy in the coming decades, yet at the same time will experience more frequent and intense climate extremes.