Climate Change: 316 to the Future

Focus on large-scale and long-term effects of climate change can sometimes obscure more immediate, operational concerns that are important and warrant anticipation and planning. The electric power industry, already dealing with demand-side impacts of global warming, will soon experience increasingly intense supply-side exigencies. In this presentation we identify and discuss a suite of environmental parameters potentially impacted by climate change. Examples include potential withdrawal excursions necessary to meet thermal limits in regionally warming receiving waters, changes in species involved with cooling systems, qualitative and quantitative changes in biofouling communities, and efficacy of antifouling technologies, hardware limits such as corrosion potentially affecting fouling, directional changes in waterway biota not anticipated in design or permit specifications, infrastructure inundation and storm effects on screens and sluices, and others. We present a bracketing series of systems planning scenarios, summarizing data useful for anticipating nature and intensity of effects, scope for responses, and threshold constraints.