Powerlines and power stations represent strategic infrastructures from an energetic viewpoint. Their future operativity maintenance is a challenge and stakeholders are strongly interested to evaluate the potential risk that may affect their functionality, especially regarding natural hazards. In Italy, geo-hydrological hazards such as floods and landslides represent a serious threat to electrical infrastructure.

Severe floods may affect the operativity of hydropower plants since they have a crucial role in balancing extreme hydrological conditions and protecting downstream areas. On the other hand, powerlines may be hit by landslides causing a local failure that may propagate through the whole electrical network. This abstract describes the new model concept called CRHyME (Climatic Rainfall Hydrogeological Model Experiment).

CRHyME is a spatially distributed model that can operate at basin scale simulating the occurrence of some geo-hydrological hazards strongly related to rainfalls such as shallow landslides and debris flow, quantifying their magnitude. Here, the potential hazard which may affect an electro-energetic
infrastructure can be addressed by evaluating the landslide susceptibility of the local territory.

CRHyME model has been written in Python language and has been conceptualized to work at a high spatial resolution using the available worldwide databases about morphology, land coverage, soil composition and hydrogeological properties. CRHyME model is currently under development. In this work, we show an application of the model where the future geo-hydrological hazard has been evaluated for high-voltage powerlines settled across two Italian catchments.

CRHyME has been applied considering three different climatic models from the EURO-CORDEX program. The results have depicted a slight increase in the geo-hydrological cycle, in accordance with the worldwide studies carried out within the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Sixth Assessment Report.

Moreover, an estimation of the location and the temporal frequency of the powerline failures induced by rainfall-induced landslides has been computed. These results should be intended useful for stakeholders for planning purposes and maintenance prioritization of the exposed infrastructures.