Resiliency stands out as super power for utilities battling ‘parade of horribles’

America’s electric utility industry is enduring what the United States Energy Association (USEA) has dubbed an existential crisis, fueled by rising threats from severe weather, wildfires, cyberattacks, supply chain shortages, and increased demand from massive data centers, customers, and AI.

In response, utilities are exhibiting their super powers, which are allowing them to manage this so-called “parade of horribles,” said Scott Aaronson, senior vice president of security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents the nation’s regulated utilities.

“We are seeing an uptick in risk and an uptick in impact,” Aaronson said during a USEA press briefing on Wednesday, “but we’re also seeing the extraordinary capabilities of the industry to respond and recover from these incidents.

“I think we’re also seeing the value of resilience,” he added, noting that while resilience doesn’t prevent these events from happening, it does limit the damage and allow for a faster recovery.”

That’s important because resilience allows the industry “to keep bad days from becoming catastrophic,” said Aaronson, who was joined by several other industry experts in addressing the situation and offering remedies — both in hardening the system against such challenges and in rapid storm remediation.

David Owens, president and energy consultant at Da’VAS, and a retired executive vice president at EEI, said statistics from NOAA that are focused on billion-dollar disasters show that globally there have been 391 weather and climate events since 1980 to the present day.

In just the last three years, Owens said there have been 66 major events that have cost more than $1 billion a piece.

“So we’re seeing a tremendous increase in the costs,” said Owens, adding that if aggregated from 1980, the total is $2.8 trillion. “So this stuff is costly,” he said.

On top of that, from 2003 to 2023, there’s been an 11-fold increase in wildfire events that have added yet another costly item to the books. “Things are getting tough,” Owens said.

Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO at California Independent System Operator (CalISO), said that from the perspective of a bulk grid operator, wildfire risk is unequivocally one of the biggest exposures that CalISO faces in the grid.

“We’ve been fortunate over the past several years that we haven’t had widespread disturbances yet to our transmission,” said Mainzer. “Our transmission systems have had enough resilience built into it. We’ve had a deep enough resource adequacy stack and a strategic reserve of additional resources that we’ve been able to ride through events such as the 2021 fire up in southern Oregon that cut out a significant fraction of the transmission capacity into California for a number of hours.”

He said that continuing to harden and to deploy data, while ensuring that the bulk system has the resiliency and the core resource adequacy tools to ride through disruptive events, is a key part of the strategy.

Mainzer also said AI has a role in helping the industry combat wildfires either before they begin or afterward.

“The major utilities in California that own the transmission infrastructure have been grappling with this issue on an extreme basis for a number of years have invested a large sum of money into the situational awareness and forecasting and response tools to make sure that their transmission infrastructure is as safe as possible,” Mainzer said during the briefing. “There’s a lot of additional work under way to harden the system and certainly AI, neural networks, data aggregation, data synthesis and deployment are also going to be a key part of that strategy.”

The most critical infrastructure upgrades for utilities and the grid operator to be focused on to enhance resilience against extreme weather is simple, according to David Naylor, president and CEO at Rayburn Electric Cooperative.

“It is just maintaining your right of ways,” he said, pointing to vegetation management strategies like tree trimming, and ensuring those areas are accessible.

“High winds and trees and power lines don’t mix very well,” Naylor said, adding that Rayburn employees clear right of ways at least once a year.

“It doesn’t solve all the problems,” he added, “but you get a lot of bang for your buck if your right of ways are clear.”

Pablo Vegas, president at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, better known as ERCOT, agreed, and said when Hurricane Beryl hit Texas recently, there was also a lot of vegetation outside the right of ways that came into play.

“We’re starting to have conversations about how do we work more closely with homeowners who can see risky vegetation that could be compromising the electric infrastructure that happens to be outside of the right of way,” Vegas said. “That has to be considered as well because you can have circumstances where you’ll have perhaps a lot of rain leading into a windstorm, and that can create an environment where trees can fall from outside of the right of way into it and create just as much damage.”

Vegas said it’s also important to take power lines into consideration when considering resilience, particularly if a utility has older wooden poles.

On a broader level, Vegas also said that other parts of the infrastructure have to be looked at when considering resiliency to these kinds of events.

“I think the transmission system at large has to be resilient to these kinds of events at large,” he said. “Meaning, if a local area has a lot of local losses in the transmission grid, you don’t want that to compromise the ability of the grid to continue serving other loads that can take energy to customers.”

ERCOT is starting to look at other steps of voltage in its transmission system, like whether it could step up from what it has today across a 345 kV system in Texas to a 500 or 765 kV system with a strong backbone network built across the state that could provide added resiliency should ERCOT have isolated areas of intense issues that could come from things like weather events.

“We think there’s a lot of potential value to that kind of infrastructure investment that not only supports resiliency, but that can also support the tremendous load growth that we’re all talking about,” Vegas said.

The post Resiliency stands out as super power for utilities battling ‘parade of horribles’ appeared first on Daily Energy Insider .