Powering through the Storm: Climate Resilience for Energy Systems

Climate change and its impacts on power systems often mean more frequent power outages and repairs, which raise maintenance costs and pose other challenges. Yet proactive modifications in project design, maintenance, and operation can enhance system resilience at lower costs than reactive adaptation. This Live Wire considers the implications of climate resilience in the power sector and highlights ongoing World Bank work and best practice, with a focus on Africa. …

Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy (RISE) 2022: Building Resilience

RISE—Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy—is a set of indicators intended for use in comparing the policy and regulatory frameworks that countries have put in place to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) on universal access to clean and modern energy. This fourth edition of the index captures policy and regulatory support that enhances sustainable energy in the form of 30 indicators and 85 subindicators distributed among four pillars: electricity access, clean cooking, renewable energy, and energy efficiency. The RISE indicators, scored on a 0–100 scale, can be used to compare 140 economies that now account for 98 …

An Emerging Blueprint for Companies: Strategies to Advance Local Climate Resilience

Climate change-fueled extreme weather and climate impacts take their toll on communities throughout the United States and on the companies that anchor them. Given the scale of threats facing communities and businesses, it is critical that private sector fully activate resources to address this challenge. In response, major companies are developing strategies to build resilience to climate impacts in the places where they operate, employ, and maintain supply chains.

This brief, An Emerging Blueprint for Companies: Strategies to Advance Local Climate Resilience, outlines how corporate resources, funding, and expertise can make a difference.

It identifies seven leadership strategies that companies …

West Virginia Regional Microgrids for Resilience Study

Microgrids allow customers and communities to minimize impacts of power outages by incorporating local power generation and energy storage to supplement the traditional power grid. Microgrids are one approach to bolster resilience of communities affected by power outages due to a natural disaster or extreme weather event.

The report identifies opportunities for deploying microgrids to increase the resilience for the state of West Virginia. It includes results from SEPA’s three-phased approach with key stakeholders in West Virginia to prioritize and evaluate potential microgrids for resilience. As part of this project, SEPA collected data to develop two mapping resources that stakeholders …

Multidimensional Resilience: Building Resilience across the Physical, Economic, and Social Domains

Municipal governments and leaders are increasingly thinking about how the physical, economic, and social domains intersect when it comes to planning for resilience, or a city’s ability to bounce back or move forward from disruptions. As part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) program, close to 100 cities around the world developed resilience strategies that were intended to holistically address threats to residents’ well-being and cities’ abilities to prosper. This meant not just adapting to or mitigating physical climate change–induced threats, but also addressing underlying social and economic stressors such as poverty, a shrinking workforce, or social inequities. …

A Review of Examples and Opportunities to Quantify the Grid Reliability and Resilience Impacts of Energy Efficiency

Grid reliability and resilience are foundational to meeting electricity needs and have significant economic and societal impacts. Energy efficiency can help meet grid reliability objectives and improve resilience, but metrics and methods used today may not fully recognize these benefits. This paper explains how existing planning processes for bulk power and distribution systems capture the impact of energy efficiency on power system reliability and resilience, with illustrative examples. We identify limitations in using existing reliability and resilience metrics to quantify efficiency and other distributed energy resource (DER) benefits. The paper concludes with opportunities for regulators and utilities to enhance planning …

Learning from Electricity Markets: How to Design a Resilience Strategy

Security of supply concerns are at the forefront of the public debate. The pandemic and post-pandemic times have demonstrated that preparing for global shocks requires the quick availability of some essential goods and services, including energy. Private incentives are typically insufficient for an economy to be prepared for rare events with large negative impacts. Instead, governments and preferably supranational institutions should implement mechanisms that make sure that prevention, detection and mitigation measures are taken. The economics of electricity capacity mechanisms provides valuable lessons for the provision of essential goods in such events, which need to be complemented with other elements …

Utility Executive Survey: How Leaders are Tackling Decarbonization, Resilience, and Equity

Intensifying hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. Ambitious clean energy commitments. Building and transportation electrification. Justice 40 and a laser focus on energy affordability.

Leaders must steer their organizations through a minefield of changes and disruptions. How can they prioritize investments and initiatives as they look to deliver clean, just, and predictable energy in the years to come?

Our latest survey answers pressing questions from nearly 200 utility executives—uncovering pain points and opportunities for utilities to get ahead.…

Advancing Vehicle-to-Grid Technology Adoption: Policy Recommendations for Improved Energy Security and Resilience

The report, “Advancing Vehicle-to-Grid Technology Adoption,” calls on policymakers to “future-proof” electric vehicles and charging infrastructure to ensure that the U.S. is poised to take advantage of V2G’s many benefits. Given increased frequency of unprecedented extreme weather events, the technology can enhance critical infrastructure resilience and emergency preparedness. V2G enables EVs to serve as “mobile energy storage units” and can provide power during outages. With bidirectional charging technology, EVs can help manage system loads during periods of high electricity demand. A single electric school bus, for example, has enough battery storage capacity to power a hospital operating room …

DC Solar for All: Implementation Plan to Scale Low- and Moderate- Income Community Solar + Storage Resilience Hubs in the District of Columbia

The District of Columbia’s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) has demonstrated that it can deliver solar benefits to low- and moderate-income (LMI) residents either with solar panels on their roof, through community solar subscriptions, or through in-kind or other direct benefits paid for with revenue generated by solar systems. So far, over 6,800 District residents have received benefits of around $500 annually from the District’s signature Solar for All (SfA) program since its inception in 2016 from over 25 MW of installed solar capacity.

The question DOEE now faces is how to scale the program to serve more residents, …