Fig. 5: Sensitivity analysis of renewable energy integration on catastrophic blackouts under the same hurricane event.

a Probability of catastrophic blackout occurrence at varying levels of renewable energy integration. The current grid (during the same period as Hurricane Fiona) with an average renewable integration level of 16.1% is marked by the red dot. The blue and orange curves show scenarios without and with additional storage, respectively. b Violin plots for the time distributions of catastrophic blackouts at varying levels of renewable energy integration without additional storage. c Distributions of catastrophic blackout occurrences at different renewable integration levels without additional storage. Each data point in the plots records the time of a catastrophic blackout occurrence and the corresponding system status (percentage of customers with electricity). A darker color in a hexagon indicates a higher density (frequency) of data points within that area. The probability for each blue point in a and the violin plots in b were calculated based on 1000 realizations generated by the proposed CRESCENT model at a specific renewable integration level under Hurricane Fiona. In the violin plot, each violin represents the distribution of system-wide blackout occurrence times at a specific level of renewable energy integration. The width of each violin indicates the frequency (probability) of blackouts at different times. The black bar within each violin shows the interquartile range, and the inside white dot represents the median time of catastrophic blackout occurrence. A larger violin size in (b) indicates more catastrophic blackouts.