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Reserve power systems are widely used to provide power to critical infrastructure systems in the event of power outages. The reserve power system may be subject to regulation, typically focussing on a strict operational time commitment, but the energy involved in supplying reserve power may be highly variable. For example, if heating or cooling is involved, energy consumption may be strongly influenced by prevailing weather conditions and seasonality. Replacing legacy assets (often diesel generators) with modern technologies could offer potential benefits and services back to the wider electricity system when not in use, therefore supporting a transition to low‐carbon energy networks. Drawing on the Great Britain telecommunications systems as an example, this paper demonstrates that meteorological reanalyses can be used to evaluate capacity requirements to maintain the regulated target of 5‐days operational reserve. Across three case‐study regions with diverse weather sensitivities, infrastructure with cooling‐driven electricity demand is shown to increase energy consumption during summer, thus determining the overall capacity of the reserve required and the availability of 'surplus' capacity. Lower risk tolerance is shown to lead to a substantial cost increase in terms of capacity required but also enhanced opportunities for surplus capacity. The use of meteorological forecast information is shown to facilitate increased surplus capacity. Availability of surplus capacity is compared to a measure of supply–stress (demand‐net‐wind) on the wider energy network. For infrastructure with cooling‐driven demand (typical of most UK telecommunication assets), it is shown that surplus availability peaks during periods of supply–stress, offering the greatest potential benefit to the national electricity grid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme weather events can cause significant damage to power distribution network infrastructure, often resulting in power outages. Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) are faced with the challenging task of responding to these outages in real time while maintaining a resilient grid. Our paper presents an innovative approach to alert operators about the potential risk associated with upcoming extreme weather through a normalized fragility curve. The uniqueness of the curve is the ability to capture regional differences across a DNO's territory while presenting operators with a means of setting unified risk thresholds. This can support a proactive response and allow the staging of necessary resources to minimize the threat posed by such events. Our approach captures the changes in failure probability associated with differing wind regimes and demonstrates the benefit of sub‐regional meteorological information. The proposed approach is demonstrated for wind events using 20 years of historical fault records from a DNO in the United Kingdom (UK). While its efficacy is demonstrated for windstorms in the UK, the approach could be applied globally to develop normalized fragility curves for other types of seasonal extreme weather events such as snowstorms, hurricanes, or linked hazards such as wildfires. The approach can also facilitate an understanding of how infrastructure may operate under future climate conditions, supporting proactive adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]