Grid Resilience Utility and Industry Grants Department of Energy

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The guidance and resources in this article should help drinking water utilities deal with present and future COVID-19 concerns, as well as other public health emergencies that will undoubtedly occur in the future. Let’s Talk Safety is designed to help you build awareness of potential work hazards and provide safety practices that help mitigate those hazards. All water systems should act to examine cybersecurity vulnerabilities and develop a cybersecurity risk management program. The overall goal of resilience should be to minimize the lost value to electric customers and society from service interruptions caused by external natural and human threats, net of costs. From a public-interest perspective, the ultimate question is whether a “resilience problem” exists; namely, either utilities are spending too much on the resilience that they presently have (however it is measured), spending too little for enhancing their resilience, or are overly resilient today. Although the investment would reduce the expected damages from a severe storm, that money might have been better spent on alternative utility activities designed to improve safety or reduce other risks.

That is why a prominent scholar harshly said that the precautionary principle “offers no guidance—not that it is wrong, but that it forbids all courses of action, including inaction.”3737.TRIGEORGIS, supra note 33, at 33. Should society not have an idea of the expected benefits from spending money today to reduce the damages from long-extended power outages? Unlike a cost-benefit analysis, the precautionary approach provides little guidance. Decision-makers would delay undertaking a major initiative until they know more about the risk level of threats. The frequencies and magnitudes of severe weather events are highly uncertain and the worst-case outcome reflects catastrophic damages of the highest magnitude.—which is most appropriate for situations where the outcomes can afflict substantial damage to property and human life, in addition to being highly uncertain. According to the precautionary principle, the optimal decision in a https://flarealestates.com/recycling-in-small-spaces-efficient-equipment-for-urban-areas.html world of less-than-perfect certainty and large risk from the status quo calls for new action.

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The application of the precautionary principle to electric power resilience seems appropriate. Assessing the economics of improved resilience should account for the likelihood of the future frequency and duration of extended outages covering a large area. Resilience, as discussed supra, focuses more on one-time extreme events with the potential for https://newtou.info/the-rise-of-sustainable-shopping-how-online-retailers-are-embracing-eco-friendly-practices/ widespread and long-lasting damage. The range of potential disruptive events is broad, and the system needs to be designed to handle high-impact, low probability events.

Indeed, the precautionary principle may not represent an https://www.hocbench.com/category/uncategorized/ economically rational way to guide socially desirable policy, especially when it involves society spending large sums of money today. The default option is that society should act to avoid a risk with potentially catastrophic consequences, irrespective of the likelihood of the event. How much money should society spend today to mitigate the consequences of major threats to the electric power system? For resilience, the precautionary principle would recognize both the possible extensive damage to society from threats to the electric power grid and the inconclusive nature of the costs from service disruptions. To wit, the precautionary principle says that society takes an inordinate risk when it attempts to prevent a potential harmful event only under certainty. Because policymakers and system operators rightly fear extended service interruptions and blackouts—they would face the brunt of criticism—they may not think twice about burdening electric customers with the cost of avoiding them.

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• One source of greater uncertainty that has proliferated recently is more extreme weather, which some experts predict to worsen in the future.4646.See Resilience Strategies for Power Outages, supra note 1.
• This includes 16 projects selected under Grid Resilience Utility and Industry Grants.
• Department of Energy announced nearly $2 billion for 38 projects that will protect the U.S. power grid against growing threats of extreme weather, lower costs for communities, and increase grid capacity to meet load growth stemming from an increase in manufacturing, data centers, and electrification.
• All water systems should act to examine cybersecurity vulnerabilities and develop a cybersecurity risk management program.

This can result in the utility modifying its future actions in response to a disaster, which will improve resilience and thereby reduce the duration of a service interruption. By spending more money to prevent service interruptions, the operator can reduce the money spent on managing an outage and restoring service. A resilient power system has the ability to withstand and recover from both malicious and inadvertent cyber and physical attacks.

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This is because resilience strategies include systems that often have complex designs and high upfront costs that federal agencies cannot cover solely through direct funding or appropriations. If you have any questions about these events, please contact OWERC- Register for an upcoming Office of Water Emergency Response and Cybersecurity (OWERC) event in the list below. Feel free to use EPA’s resources below to help you develop and conduct an exercise of your own. Join EPA for upcoming workshops and webinars on topics related to water and wastewater utility resilience. Join EPA for upcoming events on water and wastewater utility resilience.

• The application of the precautionary principle to electric power resilience seems appropriate.
• VOLL estimates can help to set resilience targets and to allocate monies toward different measures to enhance resilience.
• Overall, customer-oriented strategies incorporate flexible, market-based rules accommodating the demands of individual customers.
• The decision-maker can then better understand how uncertainty affects the cost-effectiveness of investments and other resilience-improving measures under different scenarios.
• Register for an upcoming Office of Water Emergency Response and Cybersecurity (OWERC) event in the list below.

For example, a serious limitation of input metrics (e.g., money spent on vegetation management) is that they provide no indication of how well a power system will operate in the event of a disruption or of the effectiveness of specific actions to enhance resilience.6363.See id. Metrics function best as a gross indicator signaling a potential problem warranting further inquiry. A metric, therefore, can act as a guide to future regulatory scrutiny and remedial actions.