Disasters Prompt Pivot to Resilience

The 2017 hurricane season was the worst (180 deaths, $470 billion damage). The outages in energy, water, transportation ... showed that greater resilience is imperative. In my EUEC talk, I emphasized that reliability is not enough, we need to rebuild with greater adaptability, and proactively pursue improvements.

Reliability is a metric for utilities – focusing on short events (<4 hours), singular service areas, and large energy user impacts. Resilience considers outages from days -months, multiple systems, and emphasizes prevention, recovery, survivability, and adaptability.

As society rebuilds, resilience must be incorporated vs. returning to the status quo. Distributed energy resources (DERs) and storage can be key solutions to improve adaptability. Visionary policy leadership is needed along with a coordinated, system-wide approach.

Resilience must be aggressively pursued to minimize future impacts. For example, NY State responded to Hurricane Sandy’s impacts with renewable energy goals and programs to improve resiliency. A plan for Puerto Rico includes a system-wide approach, planned recovery, DERs, and storage.

Now is the time to learn from disasters by making resilience the metric to safeguard lives, reduce risk, and avoid immense future losses.