Regional variability of climate change adaptation feasibility for timber power poles

Abstract

The uninterrupted functioning of our energy infrastructure is crucial to the operation of modern day society. Thus, the energy infrastructure we construct today must be capable of supplying reliable power in our future climate. This may require development of effective and financially viable climate change adaptation actions. This is challenging for energy infrastructure for a number of reasons, including, uncertainty about future climate, and lack of insight into the regional variability of adaptation feasibility. The work herein seeks to address these issues by using probabilistic and uncertainty modelling to examine the appropriateness of a single national climate adaptation strategy across five Australian regions under climate change scenarios. The feasibility of the climate adaptation strategy, which incorporates both alterations to network maintenance procedures and implementation of performance based design, was found to vary significantly across the five regions. The cost-benefit outcomes ranged from strongly positive for Brisbane and Sydney to negative for Perth. This regional variability highlights the difficulties associated with implementation of a nationwide climate adaptation strategy for energy infrastructure. The results, which represent valuable insight for asset managers and policymakers, thus highlight the need for detailed and regionally specific climate adaptation feasibility modelling to ensure cost-effective climate adaptation actions.

Keywords:

• Asset management
• climate change adaptation
• critical infrastructure
• regional variability
• timber power poles

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the technical input of Nathan Spencer of URI Engineering. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Flagship Cluster Fund through the project Climate Adaption Engineering for Extreme Events, in collaboration with the Sustainable Cities and Coasts Theme of the CSIRO Climate Adaption Flagship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).