By Rileigh DiDomenico. Mentored and edited by Shannon Brescher Shea.
Severe winter storms slammed into Texas a year ago, causing the worst energy infrastructure failure in state history. High winds toppled power lines and fanned wildfires in southern California this January causing power outages that affected over 70,000 people. Climate change and other manmade risks that threaten the power grid are becoming increasingly common across the country.
During a Feb. 20 virtual panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, three experts weighed in on what grid resilience means, how we improve resiliency, and how we enact these changes in an equitable way. Varun Rai from the University of Texas at Austin, Alyona Teyber from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Jean-Paul Watson from DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered questions asked by moderator Jun Bando from the California Council on Science and Technology. The panelists agreed that redesigning the grid is an extremely complex problem that requires more data and transparency to develop a resilient energy system.
“Resilience to what?” Rai asked. When we talk about grid resilience, what are we making more resilient and what are we making it resilient to?
The U.S. power grid is an interconnected network delivering electricity from producers to consumers, regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and maintained by different utilities. In addition to making the technology more efficient to improve resiliency, Rai said we also need to make the system integration more efficient. Increased integration will allow institutions to respond more readily to emergency situations.
“Resilience looks different for different stakeholders (utilities, investors, consumers, and more) and different geographical regions,” Watson added. For example, while residents in the South might be concerned about grid resilience to hurricanes, residents in the North are more concerned about grid resilience to winter storms. At the same time, everyone everywhere is concerned about grid resilience to cyber-attacks.
Resilience also varies across time scales, Teyber pointed out. “Are we talking about long-term climate adaptations or are we talking about what is happening in the next two weeks with wildfires and winds? We need to maintain resilience in the short term while we think about the long term.” This might look like replacing a few utility poles now, while making long term plans to replace the whole system later. “Who pays for these upgrades?” was another consideration raised by Watson.
The complex problem of resilience, which varies across people, place, and time, is complicated by the fact that we don’t have good metrics to measure it. “While it is common for grid failures to be measured in megawatt-hours lost, there are additional losses to consider in a failure scenario outside of the energy system like loss of productivity and loss of life,” Watson said.
Not only are we lacking metrics to quantify resilience, we lack data to predict outcomes. “How do we prepare for an event we’ve never experienced?” Teyber asked. Watson agreed, describing the most difficult part of addressing grid resiliency as decision making under uncertainty. He projects future possibilities based on data and assumptions that he inputs into models, but policymakers are required to make decisions right now.
Beyond making decisions based on data that is lacking, we are also tasked with developing socially sustainable solutions that won’t create new major problems, Rai pointed out. He said decisions we make to redesign the grid should also focus on the social and human dimensions including justice and fairness to create long term solutions.
From this discussion, it was clear the panelists thought we need to collect more data, keep having these discussions, make decisions transparently, and bring everyone forward together. Rai left the discussion hopeful, highlighting that it is an exciting time. “The energy grid is one of the most dynamic sectors, and we have the opportunity to generate deep long-term innovation that can socially put us in a better place.”
Rileigh DiDomenico is a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She studies electrocatalytic CO2 reduction, a carbon utilization strategy, and can be reached at rc835@cornell.edu.
Image: The power grid is a complex system that requires more data and transparency to develop a resilient energy system. Credit: DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
