A clean and resilient power supply is a critical concern for utilities across the United States. Electricity generation is responsible for approximately one-third of U.S. carbon emissions, and over 70% of the U.S. electricity grid is more than 25 years old. The clean energy transition is already underway, which gives utility companies an unprecedented opportunity to prepare the grid for various events, from weather anomalies to physical and digital attacks. Modernizing the grid, investing in new infrastructure and automation while ensuring grid stability are essential for the transition.
Understanding Power Grid Resilience
Electric grid resilience is the capability to withstand, respond to and recover from power disruptions. It requires a holistic approach that begins with the consumer and expands outward, placing users at the center of the framework. All threats to the power system must be considered to get an accurate representation of the grid’s resilience.
The traditional power grid involves a linear flow of services from fuel generation to the end user. These linear dependencies make the grid vulnerable at the distribution and transmission levels. A disruption in any component can cause outages for consumers, so resilience means resuming normal power grid operations quickly by compensating for component failure.
Decentralizing the power supply has given rise to a more inclusive definition of grid resilience, incorporating processes that manage oversupply or shortages stemming from integrating renewable energy sources. Another modern addition to a more inclusive definition of grid resilience is cybersecurity, which protects communities from malicious actors who can interrupt their supply from anywhere in the world.
What Is the Difference Between Grid Reliability and Resilience?
Although grid “reliability” and “resilience” are often used interchangeably, the terms represent two different goals. Grid resilience refers to how well the rest of the grid functions when one or more components are disrupted, reducing the damage from outages and shortening their duration. Reliability involves reducing the probability of power interruptions, withstanding or recovering from typical outages and meeting consumer needs.
The two terms are intertwined, and improving one improves the other. Grid resilience is an element of reliability, encompassing additional concepts like preparing for, operating through and recovering from disruptions, regardless of the cause.
Despite their differences, resilience and reliability share the following objectives:
- Provide consistent power: The primary purpose is to balance supply and demand to ensure a consistent flow of electricity through careful management and coordination.
- Minimize outages: A resilience and reliability strategy involves predicting potential incidents and tailoring the grid to ensure a steady and efficient electricity flow.
- Withstand disruptions: Many disruptions are avoidable with consistent monitoring and adjustments to the grid.
Common Challenges to Grid Resiliency
The grid faces many challenges in the modern age. Power system owners and operators must examine the costs and benefits of resilience strategies and find those that cover as many eventualities as possible. Some common challenges include:
Natural Disasters
Extreme weather events are taking a toll on the grid, and are likely to become more frequent and intense due to climate change. The effects of natural disasters are unpredictable — how they will damage grid infrastructure depends on the type and severity of the events.
For example, the winter of February 2021 had catastrophic consequences throughout Texas due to frozen instruments. Severe flooding can damage underground transformers, and powerful winds can damage power lines. Resilience means anticipating these events and testing strategies to overcome them so communities can access critical infrastructure when they need it most.
Human Beings
Physical attacks on the power grid rose 77% in 2022 alone, and extremist groups continue to identify power grids as attractive targets. However, only some human threats are intentional, and unintentional errors can have far-reaching consequences. Resilience in this context means robust physical security and comprehensive training for all personnel.
Cyber Threats
Cyber resilience is a challenge in the energy industry. Cybercriminals have the skills to create large-scale blackouts, which have severe socio-economic ramifications for individuals and businesses. Cyber attacks on power grids have already succeeded in causing significant temporary blackouts, and a comprehensive strategy to mitigate the potential damage is required.
The Key Components of a Resilient Grid
Electric grid resilience is multifaceted and depends on several factors, including modeling increasing grid complexity to withstand extreme events, cyber threats and the rapidly changing mixture of energy resources. Unlike the traditional grid setup, emerging grid resilience solutions are located closer to the user.
Distributed energy resources (DERs), like microgrids, batteries and renewables, provide targeted benefits and economic value during standard operations. The components complement one another to enhance resilience benefits and directly support critical load prioritization.
Some of the critical components of grid resiliency include:
Grid Security Measures
Physical and cyber threats are a challenge to grid resilience, and both need careful consideration to minimize malicious or accidental threats and the associated interruptions. Investing in robust security to protect data and physical assets is essential. Facilities must also provide comprehensive training to all employees to reduce human error and empower them to speak up if they identify a potential threat.
The threat landscape constantly evolves, so security strategies must be agile, undergoing continuous review, updates and testing. A zero-trust grid security framework takes a layered approach to grid protection, safeguarding assets and enacting strict access control in the physical and digital domain. All security protocols cover people, processes and technology to minimize attack surfaces and act as threats are identified.
Integration of Renewable Energy Sources
Balancing grid stability with sustainable practices is crucial in today’s energy landscape. Decentralized power generation brings many benefits, including integrating renewable energy sources and storage devices. Renewables could provide 90% of the reduction in CO2 emissions, but they also represent unique grid resilience challenges, including managing a less predictable power supply.
Overcoming these challenges involves adapting grid infrastructure to incorporate advanced technology, enabling real-time monitoring and control. Resilient systems allow communities to prepare for the worst while managing renewable resources to achieve long-term, sustainable growth. The best resilient systems empower communities to manage their own energy while achieving sustainability goals and safeguarding future generations.
Smart Grid Technologies
Smart grid technologies are essential to achieving sustainable grid resiliency. Utility companies have enjoyed great success with innovations like automatic outage detection and service restoration. After an event, the smart grid collects and analyzes the data to identify further resilience opportunities. Integrating sensors and monitoring devices throughout grid infrastructure provides additional data on weather-related parameters in real time, enabling the smart grid to respond to inclement weather and the associated challenges.
Distributed energy resource management systems solve many modern grid resiliency and sustainability challenges. Combining advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) allows utilities to make more informed decisions. AI can collect and calibrate massive amounts of data, providing a detailed grid overview and highlighting its strengths and improvement opportunities. Machine learning models conduct predictive analytics to future-proof the grid from any number of events. AI can also highlight discrepancies regarding the clean energy transition, helping utilities identify and use latent capacity.
Enhancing Grid Resilience Through Technology
Technology is one of our most effective tools for boosting grid resilience, from renewable energy sources combined with storage solutions to using advanced metering and smart devices. As the landscape continues to change, the complete modernization of the grid and its security and energy storage protocols can boost resilience in the face of new and existing challenges.
Some of the many ways technology enhances grid resiliency include:
Cybersecurity Measures for the Electric Grid
Technological grid advancements are a double-edged sword regarding cybersecurity. The increased digital and decentralized technology provides a larger attack surface, which means protecting the power supply more aggressively. The U.S. Department of Energy has called for close collaboration with the private sector to strengthen security measures and share information, focusing on three principal areas:
- Strengthening preparedness: Enhancing grid resilience means staying agile despite evolving threats. Utilities must conduct real-time threat monitoring and share information across the sector.
- Coordinating response and recovery: The decentralized energy landscape means incident response has a new purpose. Each stakeholder should have clear roles and responsibilities during and after a cyber incident, mitigating its effects and boosting grid resilience.
- Accelerating research and development of resilient delivery systems: Research and development must anticipate new and more sophisticated threats to the grid and integrate with existing systems to provide increasingly robust protection.
Smart grid operators should be able to identify potential vulnerabilities and address them proactively, mitigating threats before any damage occurs. Firewalls and anti-virus applications protect grids and users from malicious software, ransomware and dangerous traffic, which could result in data breaches. Cybersecurity measures should also ensure communications between components remain encrypted.
Another crucial aspect of grid cybersecurity is preventing unauthorized access — users accessing a system, network or asset without permission, including physical access to grid infrastructure. Access management involves advanced technology, such as biometrics and real-time alerts. Authentication techniques that verify access rights and firewalls to detect intrusions allow operators to track activities and block malicious access attempts in real time, supporting grid resilience.
Energy Storage Solutions
Energy storage solutions support the integration of renewable energy sources by counteracting intermittency, like storing energy from photovoltaic panels to use during overcast days They also contribute to grid stability by streamlining frequency and voltage regulation, reducing network charges.
Balancing supply and demand is critical for grid resilience, and energy storage solutions combat fluctuating demand patterns and variability in renewables. They store excess energy in low-demand or high-generation periods and release it when the demand exceeds supply, stabilizing the grid and avoiding blackouts. Energy storage also supports DER integration, providing localized storage and flexibility and reducing stress on distribution infrastructure.
During extreme weather events, malicious attacks or sudden load changes, a network of energy storage units can restore the load and reenergize the grid, maintaining supply-demand balance and boosting grid stability. Integrating energy storage also enhanced grid flexibility after unforeseen events, immediately reconfiguring networks to reroute energy into critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure Modernization
The electric infrastructure in the U.S. is already managing more than was ever intended. Modernizing the grid is the next logical step to ensure grid resilience, integrating state-of-the-art tools that work together and communicate to reduce the frequency and duration of power outages.
Modernization also empowers consumers to manage their energy costs and consumption, as they can access their data. Utilities also enjoy the benefits of grid modernization, including improved security and increased integration of renewable energy sources. Microgrid systems are a form of grid modernization that increases energy efficiency, lowers energy costs and enhances resiliency by delivering a consistent, independent energy supply.
Regulatory Compliance and Grid Resilience
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building a Better Grid Initiative launched in January 2022 with the aim of building upgraded transmission lines and supporting investments to modernize the grid’s resilience. It then launched the Grid Resilience Formula Grants Program in July 2022, which will distribute up to $2.3 billion to projects that generate the most community benefits. Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) supports the modernization of the grid to reduce the impact of extreme weather and natural disasters.
Various utility regulatory mechanisms exist to evaluate and prioritize grid resilience investments. A robust regulatory framework is essential to incentivize utilities to provide and maintain grid resilience, such as the directed the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) CIP-014 standard, which requires utilities to undergo an assessment of their physical security and develop a modern security plan that addresses all potential security issues.
Collaborative Efforts in Improving Grid Resilience
Grid decentralization and modernization transform energy consumers from passive to active, empowering them to manage their consumption. Improving grid resilience is a team effort in which utilities, businesses, government and communities must collaborate to achieve this shared goal. Efforts to mitigate the effects of natural disasters are also community resiliency strategies, accompanied by various incentives that provide long-term energy savings and peace of mind.
Resilience is vital in low-income communities, which are more likely to have outdated utility infrastructures and experience more outages. Addressing this inherent vulnerability means involving members of the communities that shoulder the highest burden. If grid resiliency is customer-centric, it must place the needs of these communities at the forefront.
Looking Ahead — The Future of Grid Resilience
Technology has already redefined grid resilience and will continue doing so in the future. Emerging innovations promise enhanced grid performance, allowing it to evolve with the newly empowered communities it services.
DERs already support large-scale grid resilience, and as energy storage technology evolves, they will make energy capacity more flexible. Decentralization and reduced reliance on fossil fuels make the grid more adaptable and sustainable. As we address the present challenges, we create a clean and resilient grid poised to take on future challenges.
Harness TRC’s Expertise and Innovation
The energy landscape is evolving more rapidly than ever, and keeping up to date with each change is essential to enhance grid resiliency. TRC Companies will help you navigate each change with the expertise to plan and implement your grid modernization strategy and system upgrades. As a trusted partner to the utility industry for over 50 years, we have the resources and expertise to determine each unique organization’s most effective resiliency strategy.
Partner with experts who understand and solve your current and future challenges. Contact us today to stay agile and embrace the future of grid resilience.
