Electricity Grid Resilience

The nation’s grid delivers electricity that is essential for our modern life.

However, risks such as extreme weather, cyberattacks, and electromagnetic events like solar storms can damage our electrical infrastructure (like power lines) and communications systems. The resulting power outages can threaten the nation’s economic and national security.

With examples drawn from several GAO reports, we describe these risks and highlight key opportunities to improve federal efforts in this area.…

Climate Change: Defining Adaptation and Resilience, with Implications for Policy

Congress has increased its attention to risks that climate variability and change pose to communities, the economy, and other dimensions of society. Legislative provisions related to climate change have referenced resilience or adaptation. Federal, state, and local agencies, and other stakeholders, often intend different meanings when they refer to resilience and climate change adaptation.

This product presents selected definitions in use for resilience and climate change adaptation, and describes trends and evolutions in use related to climate change. To assist Congress as it considers proposals to enhance adaptation and resilience, and exercises its appropriations and oversight functions, this product seeks …

Enhancing Cyber Resilience in Electricity Systems

Electricity is an integral part of all modern economies, supporting a range of critical services including health care, the internet and transportation. The secure supply of electricity is thus of paramount importance. Digitalization is rapidly transforming the electricity system, bringing many benefits for businesses and consumers. At the same time, increased connectivity and automation could raise risks to cybersecurity and the threat of cyberattacks. A successful cyberattack could trigger the loss of control over devices and processes in electricity systems, in turn causing physical damage and widespread service disruption.

Using real-world examples, this report offers guidance to policy makers, electric …

Climate Resilience

Electricity is an integral part of all modern economies, supporting a range of critical services. Secure supply of electricity is of paramount importance. The power sector is going through fundamental changes with increasing pressure from climate change. Climate change directly affects every segment of the electricity system altering generation potential and efficiency, testing physical resilience of transmission and distribution networks, and changing demand patterns. Effective policy measures and co-ordinated action among key actors play a central role in building resilience to climate change.

This report provides an overview of the climate impacts on electricity systems. It describes how climate change …

Resilience Roadmap: The Urgent Need for Climate Resilience Action

Building our nation’s resilience is an urgent priority. Our vulnerability to the stresses and shocks of climate change threatens US food, energy, water, transportation, and health security, imperiling our economy and our very well-being as a nation.

Our economy has never been more vulnerable to climate disasters such as droughts, flooding, storms, wildfires, and extreme weather like hurricanes and arctic storms. The consequences of this fragility disproportionally affect those already vulnerable or marginalized by structural economic, social, racial, and environmental inequities.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s ambitious commitment to tackle the climate crisis offers a timely and unprecedented opportunity to address this …

Community Land = Community Resilience: How Community Land Trusts Can Support Urban Affordable Housing and Climate Initiatives

Housing insecurity and the impacts of climate change are interrelated issues increasingly affecting cities across the United States. The communities most significantly burdened by housing costs and housing instability are also the most at-risk from climate impacts like worsening heat waves and extreme weather events; the COVID-19 pandemic has shed further light on the challenge of housing insecurity in the U.S. Community land trusts (CLTs) can present useful partnerships to simultaneously tackle these challenges by promoting community ownership and decision-making, and providing permanently affordable and resilient housing.

To help state and community leaders support community land trusts and work to …

Disrupting Vulnerability Traps and Catalyzing Community Resilience

The United States needs to radically enhance its efforts to build community disaster resilience. The frequency and cost of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters have increased significantly over the past decade. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s estimates, the direct costs of disasters between 2018 and 2019 amounted to over $136 billion. And 2017 Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria resulted in over $265 billion in damage and displaced many communities. Moreover, accelerated urbanization and climate change continue to exacerbate communities’ vulnerability to climate disasters, rendering the current disaster mitigation, recovery, and emergency response policies untenable in the near …

User Objectives and Design Approaches for Microgrids: Options for Delivering Reliability and Resilience, Clean Energy, Energy Savings, and Other Priorities

Customers choose to install microgrids based on a wide range of motivations, which often include increasing reliability and resilience, decreasing electricity costs, expanding access to clean energy, and/or providing power to remote communities (e.g., when extending the existing transmission/distribution grid is infeasible or too costly). Customer motivations are not mutually exclusive; in fact, customers often have multiple motivations for installing a microgrid, such as increasing renewable generation while improving reliability and resilience. This paper cites numerous examples of operational microgrids across the country that represent one or more of these objectives.…

Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation: Summary of 2020 Activities

This Summary of 2020 Activities describes steps we have taken, and will take, to plan and design infrastructure, and conduct operations, in a manner that addresses the effects of climate change. Our efforts will help us to maintain a safe working environment, support for our customers and communities, and operational excellence as the climate changes.

We recognize that our approach needs to be flexible as more is learned about climate change impacts. Continued collaboration with stakeholders will be key to our ability to continue to provide safe, reliable, resilient energy to our customers in a changing climate…

Reimagining Grid Resilience: A Framework For Addressing Catastrophic Threats to the US Electricity Grid in an Era of Transformational Change

Since its origins at the beginning of the last century, the electricity system has been a critical driver of US economic growth. Reliable and resilient delivery of electricity to homes and businesses is a foundation of national prosperity, and grid outages have grave consequences.

The current grid is characterized by a one-way flow of services and value that convert primary energy to value-added services. This system, with its linear dependencies and easily disrupted individual components, is inherently fragile. Disruptions within any component of the grid can cause outages for customers.

This report describes the changing nature of resilience within the …