Building Ontario Power Generation’s Resilience Toolkit

Summary

Many companies are realizing the need and benefits of proactive adaptation to climate change.

A common framework for many organizations is to conduct a broad scale vulnerability assessment of their assets and operations. This is often followed by the development of a report and the implementation of adaptations to address the top few vulnerabilities. Often the outcomes of such processes do not address individual facility risks because specific components may fail due to climate change.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is adopting the philosophy that resilience is built by inherently including climate considerations into standard business practices.

The challenge of this approach is that adaptation strategies are not developed by a small team of experts, but rather by a multitude of working level engineers and project managers. To educate and provide this group with sufficient information OPG is developing its Resilience Toolkit. This includes a curated library of reports, tools and OPG’s Climatic Atlas.

Built with the Ouranos Power Analytics and Visualization for Climate Science (PAVICS), OPG’s 2nd Edition of the Climate Atlas includes maps and datasets of climate indicators for all OPG assets.

In addition, statistical tests were pre-generated to inform users if there are significant differences between climatic periods. The Atlas is designed to inform most common adaptation decisions and to be used with other guides and processes within the Resilience Toolkit.