From Silos to Synergy: New Report Highlights Emerging Utility Practices for Integrated Resilience Planning
Severe storms, freezes, floods, and heat waves can damage grid infrastructure and cause extended power outages, and the risks of utility equipment igniting wildfires is increasing. States and utilities are aiming to reduce the impact of these threats, while keeping down electricity costs. Addressing this challenge requires harmonizing siloed planning processes to balance grid resilience with other fundamental energy objectives such as affordability, reliability, safety, and serving new loads.
A new report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Integrating Resilience Planning in Distribution System Planning, describes how to advance integration of resilience and distribution planning processes to improve planning efficiency, better prioritize cost-effective grid expenditures, and optimize investment strategies.
More than 30 states have established requirements for electric utilities to file distribution system plans, resilience plans, or both, to improve regulatory oversight (see map). Only a few states explicitly incorporate any requirements for resilience planning in distribution system plans
State requirements for distribution system and resilience planning
LBNL conducted a detailed review of 22 utility distribution system plans in 16 jurisdictions and interviewed experts to develop a framework that states and utilities can use to integrate resilience threats into broader distribution system planning (see graphic). The framework identifies 7 key integration points between resilience and distribution system planning.
Integration framework and key integration points
The report reviews emerging utility practices for each of the integration points for more holistic planning and cohesive investment strategies, summarized in the table below. The report also includes 3 case studies, related to pole hardening and microgrids, that provide practical examples of how utilities apply integrated planning.
Integrating Resilience Planning in Distribution System Planning can be downloaded here. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity provided support for the study. Report authors are Myles Collins, Arthur Mallet Dias, Paul De Martini, and Lisa Schwartz.
Contact: Myles Collins ([email protected]) and Arthur Mallet Dias ([email protected])
Emerging best practices for incorporating resilience planning in distribution system planning
