How does the electrical grid respond to a crisis? Electrical grids distribute electricity throughout the country, but what happens when widespread disaster strikes and the electrical grid is at risk? Engineers are now focusing on enhancing grid resilience.
If the power goes out after a thunderstorm, utility crews are on the job within hours to restore service and get the lights back on. Most electric utilities in the U.S. have a reputation for reliability and recovery from situations like this. It has been noticed as planners began thinking about increased natural disasters brought on by climate change, manmade interference due to malicious cyber-attacks, and the instability brought about by adding large quantities of renewable energy.
Under the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee and the North American Reliability Corporation, there are regulations and standards governing base reliability. If you have a windstorm in conjunction with fires and other disruptive systems, it creates multiple levels of failure and contingencies. This is where you start to get into resilience. This idea of going on the reliability criteria already exists because of various failures.
The Electric Power Research Institute describes resiliency as involving prevention of damage, rapid recovery after an event, and survivability, or the ability to maintain some basic level of electrical functionality to individual consumers or communities in the event of a complete loss of electrical service from the distribution system. The kinds of challenges that utilities and grid operators are contemplating have increased in severity over the last decade. According to a 2017 study by the Rhodium Group, the average residential electricity customer experiences one to two outages a year. Most of these are small-scale. Typically, power is restored in little more than two hours absent some major event, but major events play an outsized role in the statistics. From 2012 to 2016, the widespread blackouts from a single event, Hurricane Sandy, caused nearly 32% of the service disruption measured in customer hours. Individual utilities are responsible for the distribution lines going to customers. At the same time, regional transmission organizations and independent system operators supervise competitive electricity markets and manage the high voltage electricity grid to ensure reliability. They’re also responsible for planning and designing the system up to 15 years in the future. The key is to be proactive rather than reactive.
The academic world contributes to resiliency measures too. At North Carolina State University, The Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDOM) Systems Engineering Research Center was created through funding from the National Science Foundation in 2008 to modernize the electrical grid to accommodate sustainable energy, such as wind and solar power. The Freedom Center has been involved in developing online tools for assessing vulnerabilities to address cyber-physical security called distributed grid intelligence. The hope is that smart microgrids with sensors embedded throughout the system might be more resilient to failure and easier to bring back online and large multi-state electric grids. But the emerging smart grid, together with distributed renewable energy such as rooftop solar, presents a new set of challenges to resilience. The Smart Grid involves more distributed energy down to the home level. That kind of penetration adds a level of vulnerability to a cyber threat. Engineers will certainly have to pay attention to that as the grid gets smarter.
Besides natural disasters, cyber-attacks, and renewable energy, several less visible factors can affect grid resilience. In New York State, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, saw 37 workers of the state’s Independent System Operator volunteered to sequester themselves at two electric grid control centers. The 33 grid operators and managers, two facilities workers, and two food service staff members lived in trailers without contact with the outside world to maintain their health and the stability of the state electric grid. Other concerns are geomagnetic disturbances. The sun can disrupt the power system, and it happens pretty frequently. Like many resilience-oriented preparations, the steps seemed like a lot of work before an unlikely situation until they were called upon and had desperate hours to keep the lights on.
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