Delivering on Promises
Mike Beehler has over forty years of electric T&D experience at Tucson Electric Power, Hawaiian Electric Co. and Burns & McDonnell. He was educated as a civil/structural engineer at the University of Arizona and is a registered professional engineer in eight states. He serves as national spokesperson for the Power Delivery Intelligence Initiative found at www.pdi2.org and is a fellow in ASCE and member of CIGRE and IEEE.
Hurricanes, floods, ice storms, and wildfires. They seem to be getting bigger, stronger, and more destructive. Also, they seem to happen more often just as everything is being electrified and net-zero and carbon-free goals are being set. These ambitious goals put increasing demand and visibility on the legacy transmission and distribution electric grid.
The solution is resiliency. Regulators, customers, and investors are told that resiliency is what they need and what can be delivered. But, depending on who you ask, resiliency is defined several different ways. It is sometimes confusing to industry engineers and planners, and it is well beyond what a lay person can reasonably understand.
The IEEE Power Energy Society has several papers on resiliency with abstracts that read: "While the concept of resiliency is not new, its application to the electric grid is not as straightforward due to the lack of a consistent definition of resilience or a mature set of metrics by which resilience or its application can be measured. This report provides an overview of resilience definitions, including its relationship with reliability, the existing frameworks for holistically defining resilience planning and implementation processes, and the metrics to evaluate and benchmark resilience."