TT26 Energy Seminar – Week 2: Boosting energy system resilience in the face of future weather extremes
Associate Professor Sarah Sparrow, University of Oxford e-Research Centre within the department of Engineering Science,
- Start Tuesday 05 May 2026 5:00pm
- Finish Tuesday 05 May 2026 6:15pm
- Venue Diversity Room - ECI, OUCE
- Postcode OX1 3PY
- Register for event
Summary: Climate change is affecting the frequency and severity of extreme weather events around the globe. This presents a range of challenges for the energy system from the effective operation of ageing infrastructure, through end user demand changes to siting considerations for new infrastructure development. In this talk Prof Sparrow will demonstrate how consideration of likely future changes in wind, temperature and precipitation are important for cost-effective development and operation of climate resilient energy systems. Case studies will show how extreme weather analysis can inform future UK wind farm placement to maximise resilience, how heavy precipitation and associated flood analysis can be used to generate substation protection priorities in East Anglia, and how future power-outages due to heatwaves and wildfires can be minimised in Victoria, Australia. Looking more broadly the longer term changes to demand through future cooling requirements will be considered. In all cases climate-informed planning can help to boost resilience on our pathway to Net Zero energy systems and ensure that future investment decisions are cost-effective.
Speaker: Sarah Sparrow is an Associate Professor in Environmental Impact at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre within the department of Engineering Science, and deputy director of the Energy Systems MSc course. She is also the programme co-ordinator for the climateprediction.net (CPDN) distributive computing project and co-coordinates the Network for Sustainable Digital Research Infrastructure: Vision and Expertise (NetDRIVE). Following her doctorate in atmospheric physics from the University of Oxford, she worked in the IT industry on business management systems and as a post-doctoral research scientist looking at drivers of atmospheric variability and extreme weather attribution. Currently based in the Energy and Environmental Informatics research group, she has vast experience analysing large ensemble simulations for extreme weather events and their impacts on energy, infrastructure, health, water and finance. Associate Profesor Sparrow regularly organises highly successful international workshops and hackathon events on the impacts and attribution of extreme weather events and has led public engagement activities in this area. She has been instrumental in enabling new model configurations to run under the CPDN framework and currently leads projects on extreme weather attribution and impacts in Brazil, and digital tools for dengue forecasting in Vietnam.