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Can We Blackstart the U.S. Grid Today?

Never before has blackstart power restoration been more vital for national resilience. At the same time, our capabilities to conduct blackstart have never been at greater risk. This Handbook provides transmission system operators and their partners, including public and private sector organizations, with recommendations to strengthen the survivability of blackstart systems and thereby help ensure societal continuity when catastrophic, Black Sky outages occur.

A growing range of malicious threats and natural hazards can create such Black Sky events, defined as the loss of grid-provided power over multiple regions of the U.S. and Canada or equivalent wide-area blackouts on other continents. Without careful, multi-sector preparation, such events would result in cascading disruption or failure of all other societal infrastructures and product and service supply chains, throughout – and beyond – the affected regions. To save and sustain lives when these catastrophic outages occur, it will be essential to conduct blackstart restoration – that is, restarting the electric grid from inside the blacked-out area.

Doing so will present extraordinary challenges. The same catastrophic events that necessitate blackstart restoration will also disrupt the operation of blackstart-essential systems, including generators, transmission, and interdependent infrastructure, especially natural gas transmission pipelines and emergency communications networks.

At the same time, extraordinary opportunities are emerging to strengthen blackstart resilience. The accelerating deployment of solar, wind, and battery energy storage systems (BESS) could enable transmission system operators to develop innovative strategies for blackstart that leverage the decentralized nature of such generation assets. These assets constitute inverter-based resources (IBRs). The inverters that help control their power flows could, over time, also enable new ways to restart the grid. That is especially true of BESS that are connected to high voltage transmission systems. Opportunities may also emerge to support power restoration with the millions of IBRs that are connected to electric distribution systems.

At present, however, IBRs can constitute a threat to the grid’s reliability when disturbances occur and are far from ready to lead blackstart restoration. Natural gas-fueled generators will be vital for such restoration for many years to come. Yet, in some regions of the U.S. and other nations, federal and state decarbonization policies are putting increasing pressure on the availability of gas generation. This Handbook proposes options to ensure such availability for blackstart as decarbonization goes forward, and as advances in IBRs and other zero-carbon generation assets (including small modular reactors and geothermal power) enable new restoration plans and capabilities.

However, to restart the grid in the aftermath of a Black Sky event, these assets and other blackstart infrastructure must be able to survive the damage that the event inflicts. The Handbook offers recommendations to strengthen the resilience of such infrastructure, including against electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks and the cyber disruption of natural gas infrastructure and other restoration-critical assets and functions.

A core mission of the Electric Infrastructure Security Council is to do our part to help ensure that our modern societies improve their resilience against Black Sky events. To that end, a core activity is to ensure that a robust and nimble blackstart capability is available to re-energize the electric grid should electric blackouts occur – no matter the cause. As outlined in this Handbook, that capability is under increasing pressure. Increasing interconnectivity and interdependence of critical infrastructures and core societal functions continues to grow in our global economy, concomitant with the fundamental changes to electric generation that are now being driven by the imperative of limiting greenhouse gas emission to address climate change.

This handbook emerges from comprehensive analysis and recommendations provided by experts throughout the electric power sector, government officials, academia, and other non-government organizations.

We understand how critical it will be that these recommendations, coming from across the entire industry and responding to growing concerns for the viability of Black Sky-capable black start, be carefully considered by policy makers.

If we, as a Nation and as members of a global society, don’t quickly recognize that these crucial changes must be implemented, we risk moving into a state where increasing reliability issues will emerge as we transition to distributed, green generation – and that creates a risk of creating resistance and could dramatically slow the important grid transition. The only option to go greener is to do so in a way that will also build robust reliability for the grid.

These recommendations for enhancing and making available robust black sky-class black start across all power grids are critical to ensure a green, renewable future that is even more reliable and resilient than the current grid. We can do it if we act together, now.