Full Title: Valuing Resilience for Microgrids: Challenges, Innovative Approaches, and State Needs
Author(s): Wilson Rickerson, Kiera Zitelman, Kelsey Jones
Publisher(s): National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), National Association of State Energy Officals (NASEO)
Publication Date: February 11, 2022
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
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 outages grows. Against this backdrop, resilience has emerged as a key consideration to guide electricity spending, whether from utilities, customers, or taxpayers. Although reliability has been defined and measured for decades with broadly accepted metrics that measure how many customers lose power and at what frequency and duration, resilience considers the electricity system’s response to a disruption and its subsequent impacts on customers. Developing tools and methods to accurately assess the costs and benefits of resilience investments is a critical step toward the goal of mitigating the impacts of outages on customers and society.