Building hurricane-resilient urban grid by climate-informed system hardening optimization

Climate-driven extreme weather increasingly threatens urban electricity distribution networks, undermining energy security, economic stability, and global climate adaptation goals. In hurricane-prone regions, resilience planning often lacks the granularity to align infrastructure investments with spatially diverse risk profiles, leading to inefficient resource allocation and persistent vulnerabilities. We integrate high-resolution hurricane wind field modeling (10-m grid, 6-min intervals) with high-fidelity synthetic distribution networks into a climate-informed system hardening optimization framework, enabling exposure-tiered reinforcement strategies across urban grids. Applied to Virginia’s coastal and inland cities, this framework reduces hurricane-induced load losses by 15–40% compared to uniform and static hardening approaches. Risk-averse planning, prioritizing protection against rare, extreme events, increases losses by only 3–8% in high-exposure coastal areas but degrades performance by 14.7–32.1% in low-risk inland regions. Marginal benefit analysis identifies hardening saturation thresholds ranging from one-third inland to slightly over half on the coast. By bridging climate science, power systems engineering, and decision analytics, this framework equips utilities and policymakers with precise, scalable metrics to optimize resilience investments, safeguarding millions of residents and critical services in hurricane-prone urban regions worldwide.