As climate threats escalate and infrastructure becomes increasingly interconnected, utility resilience is no longer just about hardening individual assets; it is also about ensuring the interconnectedness of these assets.
The EIS Council’s Resilience and Redundancy Policy Working Group is working to redefine how we measure and manage resilience across the electric and water sectors—moving beyond outdated models and toward system-level resilience metrics that better reflect today’s risks.
The Problem: Current Resilience Models Are Too Narrow
Many utilities today rely on threat-asset pairings to evaluate resilience, asking questions like, “If a Category 4 hurricane hits this substation, what happens?” This method, while intuitive, has significant limitations:
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It assumes independent asset performance, ignoring the growing interdependence between sectors.
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It focuses largely on direct utility costs, often neglecting broader societal and community impacts.
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It lacks the scope to capture cascading failures that ripple through interconnected systems.
The Case for System-Level Resilience Metrics
In today’s complex grid environment, resilience must be measured at the system level. We need system-level resilience metrics that account for how failures in one part of the infrastructure can lead to widespread disruptions across other sectors.
This shift would:
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Enable more holistic risk assessments
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Account for interdependencies between electricity, water, telecom, and transportation
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Improve utility planning by modeling cascading impacts
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Better inform regulatory decision-making and investment justification
The “Plausible-Intolerable” Threshold: A Smarter Regulatory Lens
To bridge the gap between affordability and safety, the Working Group proposes a new framework: focus on threats that are both plausible and have intolerable societal consequences.
This threshold can:
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Guide resilience investment levels as a percentage of total system value
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Offer a transparent metric for justifying resilience spending to regulators and ratepayers
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Help balance risk reduction with economic feasibility
Why Interdependency Matters Now More Than Ever
Critical infrastructure sectors no longer operate in isolation. Yet today, information sharing between sectors remains limited, leaving systemic risks underappreciated and under-addressed.
The evolution of the electric grid, including the rising integration of renewables, mass electrification, and surging demand, adds layers of uncertainty. Without shared responsibility and system-level modeling, we risk being unprepared for tomorrow’s disruptions.
Resilience Must Evolve with the System
Resilience is no longer just a matter of protecting assets. It’s about safeguarding the critical functions of a deeply interconnected system. That requires new models, shared data, and a collective commitment to anticipating the worst before it happens.
Moving forward, system-level resilience metrics will be essential to capture the true scope of risk and guide smarter, cross-sector investment in resilience. The future of resilience lies not in isolated hardening efforts, but in understanding how systems fail together—and how they can recover together.
By: Chris Beck
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