Experts say electric system resiliency efforts should focus on customer impact
WASHINGTON – Regulators traditionally evaluate investments in the electric grid for their impact on reliability, which generally means their value in helping to keep the lights on.
But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is asking if it needs to act on another factor, resilience, which addresses a system’s ability to endure disruption.
A panel of experts discussed the topic Monday at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ Winter Policy Summit in Washington D.C.
If the NARUC conversation was any indication, there will be much more discussion before federal regulators decide.
“Resiliency does not equal reliability. Reliability does not equal resiliency. But resiliency measures absolutely enhance reliability and, in all likelihood, reliability enhances resilience,” said Alison Silverstein, a veteran energy industry consultant on the panel.
The issue emerged in January when FERC rejected a proposal by the Department of Energy to subsidize coal and nuclear power plants to keep them running for grid reliability and resilience.
The commission opened a new proceeding focused on resilience, saying past efforts to ensure reliability addressed resilience, although not by that specific name. It, nevertheless, said resilience is an important issue that warrants the agency’s continued attention.
FERC directed a series of questions to the nation’s transmission system operators, asking what additional steps could be taken to strengthen resilience of the electric system.
To provide some guidance, FERC offered a definition of resilience: “The ability to withstand and reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events, which includes the capability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from such an event.”
The definition is from a 2009 report by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council.
During Monday’s panel discussion, Silverstein said that in examining resilience, impacts to customers should be central.
More than 95 percent of customer outages are a result of issues, such as storms, that affect the transmission and distribution systems. They’re not generally caused by problems affecting power plants, she said.
“Generation resilience is a wonderful concept that has very little to do with improving resilience for the end-use customer. And, just to put it right out there, we build and run the power system for end users, not just for the fun of it,” she said.
“Tree trimming, pole replacement, energy efficiency do a lot more to protect customers from outages than a number of measures we can think of at the bulk power system level or at the generation level.”
“Since most customer outages occur from T&D, not from generation, we should spend more on T&D,” Silverstein said. This would include spending on design, asset management and vegetation management.
Having a large, diverse pool of resources to draw from is another element of resilience, she said. “Everything’s going to fail in some way so the more solutions that you have, the broader you’re spreading that vulnerability, which is pretty classic risk theory.”
Over the long term, the best way to protect customers from outages is to improve buildings and appliances, she said. Customers want buildings that stay warmer or cooler longer and refrigerators that protect food and medicine longer.
“And I don’t care why I’m out of service, and I don’t care how long it takes you to fix it. I want to be safe and I want my parents and my neighbors to be safe in my community,” she said. “So resilience should not just be about extreme events. Outages happen for many reasons and customers want to be protected from them regardless of why the grid has gone down.”
In light of climate change, which many environmentalists say will result in stronger and more-damaging storms, Silverstein said transmission and distribution planners need to look long term.
“We’re designing them looking in the rear view mirror based on sort of Ozzie-and-Harriet weather conditions. We are no longer in that world,” Silverstein said. “We need to be designing transmission and distribution assets that are looking 40 or 50 years out in terms of how ugly climate change-based extreme weather is becoming.”
“The new normal is not good and we don’t have transmission and distribution that is designed to suit it,” she added. “So if you are approving something that’s designed on same-old, same-old T&D, you are guaranteeing that your folks are going to build something that isn’t going to cut it in 20 years.”
With the tools available today, customers can influence a system’s resilience. “Customers have the capability to act, to shift the probability of failure,” Silverstein said.
“They can do demand response, they can do distributed resources, they can modify their demand to match supply, instead of just having supply do all of the work and bear all of the risk, or, rather, supply bear all of the cost and customers bear all the consequences.”
Silverstein said she recommends creating a new bottom-line, cost-benefit calculation against which to measure each reliability and resilience option.
“It’s not just what does this do to the bulk power system,” she said. “It’s what should it do to the customer.”
Robin Lunt, an energy industry attorney, said the determination of resilience transcends any single agency.
“It’s complex. I think that there’s great promise in thinking about resilience from generation all the way to the customer. And you need an electron to go to the customer for the system to be resilient and reliable,” Lunt said. “But everyone has to collaborate in getting to that answer.
“It’s not just a FERC issue. It’s not just a DOE issue. It’s not just a state issue. It’s something where there needs to be a robust conversation,” she added.
Making the customer and the community more resilient is an important approach, said Ashad Mansoor, senior vice president of Research and Development at the Electric Power Research Institute. “It’s not just about grid resiliency.”
Mansoor reinforced Silverstein’s view that resilience can be enhanced at the distribution level, the lower-voltage system of poles and wires that delivers power directly to homes and businesses.
“The reason we’re having the resiliency discussion today was the last year’s storms that impacted primarily the distribution system,” he said.
The distribution system falls under state regulation, outside of FERC’s jurisdiction. In its order, FERC encourages transmission system operators and other interested parties to engage with state regulators about resilience on the distribution system.
Characterizing it as “new thinking,” Mansoor suggested applying a shared economic model to gain efficiencies on the electric grid like those achieved by Uber in the transportation sector and Airbnb in lodging.
“You’re really talking about a customer-to-grid shared economy,” he said.
Features such as micro-grids, electric vehicles, rooftop solar systems, smart meters and smart inverters, can be viewed not just as devices serving customers, but also as community assets for reliability and grid enhancement.
“A shared economy, a shared resource model, is good for the customer, good for the community, good for the grid,” he said.
