Electricity Grid: DOE Should Address Lessons Learned from Previous Disasters to Enhance Resilience

Natural disasters, such as cyclones, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, and severe storms—and the power outages resulting from these disasters—have affected millions of customers and cost billions of dollars. The growing severity of wildfires and extreme weather events in recent years has been a principal contributor to an increase in the frequency and duration of power outages in the U.S. Federal agencies, such as DOE and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, play a significant role in disaster response, recovery, and resilience.

This report (1) identifies lessons learned from federal, state, and other entities’ responses to selected disasters that affected the electricity grid …

How to Use Capital Funding to Build System Resilience, Reduce Risk, and Save Money

Steel does not last forever. A significant percentage of the steel utility structures in service are over 40 years old, an age at which
the cumulative effects of corrosion begin to take their toll. Traditionally, utilities have not included below-grade assessments in their maintenance programs, resulting in unseen and unidentified hazards. These facts, combined with environmental impacts, have put America’s steel transmission structures, and the country’s power grid, at increasing risk.

Steel structure assessment and remediation results in structures that are more resilient in weather events, last significantly longer, and cost less to maintain. The outcome is an improved and …

The Climate Resilience-Economy Nexus: Advancing Common Goals

Communities across the United States are experiencing increasingly severe and frequent floods, wildfires, extreme heat, and other hazards due to climate change. These hazards are impacting local economies by damaging critical infrastructure and commercial districts, disrupting business operations, reducing municipal budgets, threatening worker safety, and reducing housing supply and affordability, among other impacts. Economic development strategies can help address these risks and create new economic opportunities, but to be effective over the long-term, they need to plan for a changing climate. Similarly, incorporating economic development considerations into climate resilience-focused efforts can unlock new benefits of resilience and meet emerging needs …

Electric School Buses and the Grid: Unlocking the Power of School Transportation to Build Resilience and a Clean Energy Future

School buses are the largest form of public transportation in the United States. Every day, 480,000 of them carry up to half of America’s children to school and back.

Currently, fewer than 1% of the nation’s school buses are powered by electricity, but with advances in electric bus technology, growing understanding of the benefits of electrification, and now a fresh influx of federal money through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, electric school buses are becoming an increasingly viable option for school districts. Electric school bus models are now available to meet every use case, and the number of districts …

Valuing Resilience for Microgrids: Challenges, Innovative Approaches, and State Needs

The United States depends on the delivery of reliable, affordable, clean, and safe electricity. Electric utilities invest billions of dollars each year in generation, transmission, and distribution assets to meet this need. However, experiences with recent natural disasters of increasing frequency and duration demonstrate the shortcomings of this approach in the face of modern threats. Further, as customers rely on electricity for a broader range of important needs, such as transportation, as well as critical life-saving services and mission critical facilities such as water treatment, medical care, shelters, telecommunications, and more, the need to minimize the likelihood and impacts of …

Rooftop Solar and the 2021 Texas Power Crisis: Exploring Small-Scale Solar’s Potential to Improve Grid Resilience During a Deep Freeze Event

Solar energy is a remarkable resource. It is abundant – the U.S. has the technical potential to meet its 2020 electricity needs 78 times over with solar power alone. As a clean and renewable energy source that can help reduce reliance on dirty fossil fuels, it helps reduce pollution and protect the environment. Rooftop solar is particularly environmentally friendly, since it takes advantage of already-developed rooftops and leaves open spaces undisturbed. One additional benefit that small-scale, distributed solar offers to communities is helping to relieve strain on the power grid during times of stress. This paper explores how maximizing rooftop …

State Governance, Planning, and Financing to Enhance Energy Resilience

From 2011 to 2020, the United States faced an average of 14 distinct billion-dollar disasters annually at an average cost of $93 billion. Beyond impacting lives and livelihoods, major natural disasters can devastate energy systems and require expensive repairs and improvements. For this guide, NGA and NASEO are defining resilience as the ability to withstand disasters better, respond effectively, and recover more quickly and to a more improved state.

To help Governors and State Energy Offices strengthen state preparedness, this guide describes the range of resilience governance structures, plans, and funding mechanisms that states are leveraging to enhance energy resilience. …

Electricity-Water Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies: How States Can Enhance Resilience and Reduce Risks

Electricity is essential for the operation of virtually all other critical sectors, such as water, telecommunications, natural gas, transportation, and petroleum products. Further, in many cases each of these other vital sectors are critical to the generation and operation of the electric grid. During a power outage caused by a human or natural disaster, impacts are not limited to one sector, and the resulting economic and human consequences ripple across multiple sectors and impact the lives and livelihoods of not only the community affected by the disaster, but oftentimes neighboring communities and states as well.

This report explores the importance …

2021 Governors’ Climate Resilience Playbook

In 2020, 22 weather events across the U.S.—defined and tracked by the federal government as “billion-dollar disasters”—caused $95 billion in cumulative damages, shattering previous records. States must move swiftly to build their resilience to these and other climate impacts. In doing so, they can save billions of dollars and make America’s communities more vibrant, healthy and prosperous.

An update to the 2018 version, the 2021 Governors’ Climate Resilience Playbook outlines 12 foundational steps to set and achieve an effective state-level climate resilience agenda.…

A Federal Policy Action Plan to Accelerate Local Climate Resilience

Communities across the United States are facing catastrophic extreme weather events that are growing in intensity and frequency due to climate change. Improving climate resilience can alleviate the impact of these events, but federal policies and programs fall short of supporting the level of action needed to help communities overcome planning and implementation challenges. This brief provides an action plan for how the federal government can accelerate local climate resilience. This plan includes: working effectively and strategically to administer government resources; providing leadership to address gaps and drive the direction of resilience action; addressing inequities that put low-income and marginalized …