Title: Enhancing the Resilience of Energy Infrastructure under Wind Hazards: Solar and Transmission Structures

Abstract: Achieving the goal of transition to renewable energies such as solar requires reduction of costs. As the cost of solar modules declined dramatically in the past decades, the cost of the solar support structures has become a significant portion of the total cost. As a result, without proper engineer guidance, cost pressures will drive unsafe designs. Additionally, significant investments in transmission infrastructure will also be required to accommodate new large-scale generation from solar and wind. The design of these solar and transmission structures needs to balance cost and resilience to natural hazards, primarily windstorms.

This presentation introduces recent achievements in the design and damage assessment of solar and transmission structures subjected to wind hazards. To understand the dynamic lifetime demands on solar structures, a combination of statistical analysis of historical wind records, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element analysis is used. The work underscores the importance of considering the dynamic nature of wind loading, which is currently often neglected in the design of solar structures. The obtained lifetime demands are then used as loading protocols in the experimental tests of solar structures, which reveal solar structures’ performance in their lifetime. In addition, hurricane risk analysis of transmission networks is achieved through selection of representative hurricane wind records, nonlinear dynamic analysis and collapse fragility development of transmission towers, and regional failure analysis of transmission lines. These results can help design more resilient energy infrastructure.

Bio: Xinlong Du is a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley, where he is looking at damage of solar arrays under windstorms. He received his PhD degree from Northeastern University in 2022. His doctoral research was focused on failure of electrical transmission towers subjected to hurricanes. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Central South University and Tongji University in China, respectively. His general research aims are to enhance the resilience of energy infrastructure under natural hazards and increase the accessibility and affordability of renewable energy.