Power System Resilience: What It Is and Why It's Important
In today’s interconnected world, where electricity powers everything we do, ensuring our electricity system can come back online after an outage is essential. This assurance comes from a concept known as power system resilience, which plays a key role in maintaining our existence as a species. In the blog post, we’ll dive into power system resilience by exploring its importance, the challenges faced with resilience, and efforts in standardizing what the term actually means.
What is Power System Resilience?
At its core, power system resilience is the ability of our electrical infrastructure (generation, transmission, distribution) to adapt to changing conditions on the electrical grid as well as bounce back from disruptions. These disruptions include extreme weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms, as well as physical and cyberattacks. Image power system resilience as a safety net that helps prevent widespread and prolonged power outages.
The term resilience likely comes from C. S. Holling, a Canadian ecologist, in his 1973 paper on the resilience of ecological systems. In ecology, resilience refers to the ability of an ecosystem to respond to a disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly. With respect to power systems, resilience refers to the ability of the electrical infrastructure to quickly be restored after a high-impact, low-frequency event (i.e. hurricane).
Why is Power System Resilience Important?
There are a few reasons why resilience is important to the power system, including electrical reliability, economic stability, public safety, and the energy transition. At a high level, here’s one way to think about each of these issues:
Electric Disruptions: One of the primary goals of any power system is to maintain the flow of electricity without interruptions, which is easier said than done. When power system disruptions occur, be it due to storms, equipment failures, or unforeseen events, power system resilience ensures that electricity is restored quickly by minimizing outage downtime.
Economic Stability: For our economy to run smoothly, a resilient power system is vital. Commerce relies on a steady power supply to continue business operations, so any prolonged power outages, without resilience built into the power system, may significantly increase economic losses.
Public Safety: When a natural disaster strikes, public safety is front and center. Those in a disaster area need power for critical care services like hospitals, emergency services, and essential infrastructure. Resilience in the power system allows power to flow to the public to help in the recovery effort.
Energy Transition: As the power grid transitions to more renewable energy resources, the resilience of the power system is paramount. Renewable energy resources output, like solar and wind, can be sensitive to different amounts of sunlight and wind resources, making it imperative to have storage technologies like battery energy storage systems play a role in preventing disruptions in power supply.
Challenges of Power System Resilience
Power system resilience doesn't come without its fair share of challenges which may include any one of the following:
Complexity: Power systems, made up of generation, transmission, and distribution networks are comprised of various components. This can make ensuring resilience a challenge without proper resource planning.
Quantitative Analysis: Unlike electric reliability, which has well-defined metrics, power system resilience lacks standardized quantitative metrics. In turn, this can make it harder to evaluate the impacts of outage events when compared to electric reliability.
Categorization: As with any complex system with different stakeholders, defining and categorizing the aspects of power system resilience can be challenging. Efforts have been and are underway to introduce standardization into resiliency metrics.
Efforts in Standardization and Categorization
Experts recognize the need for a standardized framework with respect to power system resilience metrics. Developing standard measures to asses how resilient a power system is will be key. By undertaking standardization efforts, policymakers along with utilities can potentially make more informed decisions on how to enhance power system resilience.
Those making the sausage are also exploring how to categorize the different aspects of power system resilience. Categorization may help the market better understand the various components of resilience, from impacts like extreme weather events to changing market conditions.
Conclusion
Power system resilience is the magician behind the curtain in our modern electric world ensuring the lights turn back on so that businesses can keep running and our communities are safe when a high-impact, low-frequency event occurs. Standardization and categorization efforts are helping to pave the way to build even more resilience into future power outage events. As the electricity market moves forward, power system resilience will continue to play a crucial role by ensuring we have a grid we can all depend on.
