The paper addresses the research ongoing in Italy in the field of resilience of power lines to characterize the threats, as well as to study components and systems vulnerabilities, to manage critical situations by allowing adequate reaction time for operations and maintenance or identifying potential mitigation measures to limit the impact of climate change. Special attention is devoted to the major threats affecting the overhead line performances related to extreme weather conditions: wet snow, extreme winds, heavy precipitations, and floods.

The first step in the procedure is the characterization and quantification of the current threats, based on extended meteorological reanalysis: a specific dataset named MEteorological Reanalysis Italian DAtaset (MERIDA) has been developed and configured to describe the typical weather conditions of Italy in the present climate. Projections into future scenarios are inferred at the light of climate modelling, considering different greenhouse gases emissions scenarios to evaluate extreme events expected by the end of the Century.

The estimation of the climate evolution in the next decades is carried out by computing a multi-model ensemble based on a set of climate models developed in the framework of EU Euro-CORDEX Project, after verifying the performances of each model against MERIDA results in describing the climate in the last decades. Addressing, respectively, the timescales of meteorology and climate, the procedures enable the computation of the statistical return time of specific critical events, essential in the evaluation of resilience of power lines at short and long term.

The vulnerability of different configurations of power lines and their components (e.g., type of conductors, ground wires, insulators, etc.) is evaluated both under laboratory conditions and in service conditions, through in-service monitoring systems specifically developed for the purpose. Each of the evaluation steps are used to feed a resilience approach tool which implements the risk-based resilience assessment and enhancement analysis.