URBAN RESILIENCE FACING ATMOSPHERIC DISCHARGES AND FLOODS IN BARCELONA

Did you know that “Resilience” was one of the 3 most consulted words of 2016 in the RAE, the Spanish language dictionary edited and developed by the Royal Spanish Academy? This reveals to us the importance of not only knowing the term itself. It also tells us the importance of the word as an integrated concept in our society. This means that the word matters to us, we want to know more about it.

The fact of being a trendy word it does not make it less valuable. On the contrary, it is a rising value for the word. A value that our societies, our citizens and our cities might need to learn more in deep.

The concept of urban resilience is at the center of all eyes. It is key in the future of our cities. This is where RESCCUE comes in. Resilience to deal with climate change in urban areas.

In a previous article, we focused on microgrids, independent small-scale electric systems that are able to autonomously generate and store energy, normally operating connected to a traditional centralised grid. They are a very useful tool to maintain the functionality of the electric grid during crisis events. Therefore, as part of the RESCCUE project, Endesa is studying how to use microgrids that can supply power in an event of an emergency or risk.

Beyond microgrids, in Barcelona Endesa is developing at intermediate points of medium voltage lines, an experimental method to optimize the location of metal oxide lightning rods, in order to reduce the number of breakdowns events and incidents due to atmospheric discharges.

The impact of the discharges of atmospheric origin on the medium voltage lines generates overvoltages in these lines, which can produce interruptions in the supply of the energy and damage into the electric infrastructures.

Therefore, when the SAIDI (System Average Interruption Frequency Index) is high due to atmospheric discharges, we optimize the installation of these new lightning rods at intermediate points in order to minimize their impact. How are we doing that? The lightning rods allow us to carry out detailed studies of the power lines and get to the root of the breakdown events, which help us performing various corrective maintenance processes.

However, we have not only taken into account the atmospheric discharges. The modeling of the Barcelona electrical system in RESCCUE has been carried out based on the heavy historical rains, the flooding of the rivers and the sea. Thanks to RESCCUE, we can simulate possible contingencies and cascading effects in any of the potentially flooded electrical installations (such as primary substations, secondary substations and their interconnections).