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Across recent years, there has been a growing prevalence of extreme weather events throughout the United States, posing significant challenges to the reliable and resilient operation of power systems. Specifically, summer droughts threaten to severely reduce available generation capacity to meet regional electricity demand, potentially leading to power outages. This underscores the importance of accurate resource adequacy (RA) assessment to ensure the reliable operation of the nation's energy infrastructure. Accurately evaluating the usable capacity of regional generation fleets is a challenging undertaking due to the intricate interactions between power systems and hydro-climatic systems. This paper proposes a systematic and analytical framework to evaluate the impacts of extreme summer drought events on the available capacity of various generating technologies, incorporating both meteorological and hydrologic factors. The framework provides detailed plant-level capacity derating models for hydroelectric, thermoelectric, and renewable power plants, facilitating evaluations with high temporal and spatial resolution. The application of the proposed impact assessment framework to the 2025 generation fleet of the real-world power system within the PJM and SERC regions of the United States yields insightful results. By analyzing the daily usable capacity of 6,055 at-risk generators across the study region, it shows that the summer capacity deration is most significant for hydroelectric and once-through thermal power plants, followed by recirculating thermal power plants and combustion turbines. In the event of the recurrence of the 2007 southeastern summer drought event in the near future, the generation fleet could experience a substantial reduction in available capacity, estimated at approximately 8.5 GW, compared to typical summer conditions. The sensitivity analysis reveals that the usable capacity of the generation fleet would suffer an even more significant decrease under conditions of increasingly severe summer droughts. The proposed approach and the findings of this study provide valuable methodologies and insights, empowering stakeholders to bolster the resilience of power systems against the potentially devastating effects of future extreme drought events. [Display omitted] • A systematic summer droughts generating capacity assessment framework is developed. • Capacity derating models for various generation technologies are presented. • The impacts of summer droughts on generating fleet in PJM and SERC are studied. • Impact of extreme summer drought on usable capacity of generators is significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intensification of global climate change has led to a widespread consensus on carbon reduction, with the power industry being the principal contributor to carbon emissions necessitating an inevitable transition of its energy structure. Concomitantly, the escalating frequency of natural disasters caused by extreme weather presents formidable challenges to both secure power supply and the low-carbon transition of the power system. To fulfill the developmental requirements of a low-carbon power system and address the carbon emission risks imposed by natural disasters, this paper proposes a bi-level model for generation expansion planning (GEP) that incorporates constraints on the carbon emission trajectory and the influence of natural disasters. The planning-level model optimizes investment costs of various generation technologies and energy storage (ES), as well as the overall operational expenses over the planning period, with an objective to minimize them. It incorporates carbon emission trajectory constraints and policy constraints, such as carbon peaking, carbon neutrality and renewable energy (RE) penetration rates, in order to optimize the planning installed capacity of power sources. The operational-level model aims to minimize typical daily operating costs while also simulating power unit outputs in routine and disaster scenarios. A case study is conducted in a disaster-prone province in southern China to analyze the power generation expansion planning and the trajectory of carbon emissions from 2020 to 2060 under different scenarios. The simulation results show that compared to thermal power, the planning scheme mainly focused on RE with ES is better suited to achieve the goal of a low-carbon transition of the power grid. Moreover, after considering natural disasters, the cost and carbon emissions of power system planning are higher, and the risk of carbon emissions increases with the severity of disasters. • A multi-time scale bi-level low-carbon GEP model is proposed. • Natural disaster scenarios and low-carbon policy constraints are considered in the GEP model. • Carbon emission trajectory of the planned power system is estimated and introduced as a constraint into the GEP model. • Evaluation indicators that comprehensively consider low-carbon performance and economic feasibility are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]