A Scalable Approach to Large Scale Risk-Averse Distribution Grid Expansion Planning
Not Available
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
SEARCH · Search NASA
Results for “reliability, risk, and resilience”
Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Toward Reaching a Consensus on the Concept of Power System Resilience: Definitions, Assessment Frameworks, and Metrics
Not Available
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Alternative Ratemaking in the US: A Prerequisite for Grid Modernization or an Unwarranted Shift of Risk to Customers?
With increasing frequency, investor-owned electric utilities are requesting preferred cost recovery for "grid modernization" in multiple forms, from multi-year rate plans to riders. Utilities' claims that massive grid investment is necessary, and that exceptional investment requires exceptional cost recovery, are typically accepted by policymakers with little challenge. It is difficult for policymakers to resist the siren call of grid modernization's perceived outcomes, from improved reliability and resilience to reduced risks to safety and new customer technology adoption (electric vehicles, distributed energy resources, and more). This paper provides a contrarian viewpoint that is virtually absent as policymakers consider alternative ratemaking practices. It introduces the possibility that excess grid investment in the name of modernization is not only possible, and economically harmful, but has already occurred, encouraged by alternative ratemaking. It provides examples of common grid modernization expenditures the authors have identified as cost-ineffective in the course of their work. It also describes traditional grid planning practices with proven ability to address changing requirements over time, calling into question the need for exceptional grid modernization investment plans. Most important, the paper explains the moral hazard inherent in alternative ratemaking, and the fundamental shift in ratemaking risks and responsibilities from utilities to customers that results. The perspectives this paper presents are critical for policymakers to understand before adopting, extending, or expanding alternative ratemaking practices in their respective jurisdictions.
ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY,POWER TRANSMI↗
Microgrid resilience: A holistic approach for assessing threats, identifying vulnerabilities, and designing corresponding mitigation strategies
Not Available
Mishra, Sakshi (ORCID:0000000252028676)↗
Anticipating water distribution service outages from increasing temperatures
With projected temperature increases and extreme events due to climate change for many regions of the world, characterizing the impacts of these emerging hazards on water distribution systems is necessary to identify and prioritize adaptation strategies for ensuring reliability. To aid decision-making, new insights are needed into how water distribution system reliability to climate-driven heat will change, and the proactive maintenance strategies available to combat failures. To this end, we present the model Perses, a framework that joins a water distribution network hydraulic solver with reliability models of physical assets or components to estimate temperature increase-driven failures and resulting service outages in the long term. A theoretical case study is developed using Phoenix, Arizona temperature profiles, a city with extreme temperatures and a rapidly expanding infrastructure. By end-of-century under hotter futures there are projected to be 1%–5% more pump failures, 2%–5% more PVC pipe failures, and 3%–7% more iron pipe failures (RCP 4.5–8.5) than a baseline historical temperature profile. Service outages, which constitute inadequate pressure for domestic and commercial use are projected to increase by 16%–26% above the baseline under maximum temperature conditions. The exceedance of baseline failures, when compounded across a large metro region, reveals potential challenges for budgeting, management, and maintenance. An exploration of the mitigation potential of adaptation strategies shows that expedited repair times are capable of offsetting the additional outages from climate change, but will come with a cost.
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
Natural Hazard Forecast Alert Grid Risk System
Weather events cause most power outages. Often, we even get notifications on our phones to take cover or be prepared for an imminent event. If electric grid utilities had a similar warning that also included probable scenarios and the equipment involved, they could prepare and minimize the effects. Idaho National Laboratory had a project with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response program to develop a grid alert application that receives messages from the existing emergency alert system, filters and determines components possibly affected by the emergency event, calculates probable scenarios using MASTERRI (Modeling And Simulation for Targeted Reliability and Resilience Improvement). For high-risk events, the application can then send alert links to subscribed electric distribution utility operations staff to allow them to see and evaluate the scenarios and the impact in a web based interactive map tool. This proof of concept application used data from utilities and organizations, such as the international regulatory body North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which have complied historical failure data of elements that comprise the U.S. electric grid. Nominal failure rates are obtained from this data. To make this tool possible, estimated failure rates were calculated for different component types given the alert type, severity, and location. Historic weather-related grid element failures were correlated with historic weather events from the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System. These correlated events and failures are used along with Bayesian updates from the historical norms to provide a modified failure rate for grid elements in the alert areas and calculate probable scenarios. Working with an industry collaborator, actual grid models and data were used for demonstration cases. This report outlines the work performed for this project.
24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Risk-controlled Expansion Planning with Distributed Resources (REPAIR) v1.0
The Risk-controlled Expansion Planning with Distributed Resources (REPAIR) is an innovative tool to support decisions around utility grid planning to prevent and mitigate the impact of outages caused by routine equipment failures (reliability) or by extreme events (resilience), such as storms, earthquakes or wildfires that long term interruption of service. REPAIR is a risk-based optimization and decision-making model allowing informed and transparent "cost vs risk" decisions regarding infrastructural planning of electric utilities. The model considers long-term resilience and reliability planning strategies that rely on traditional infrastructure upgrade (e.g. circuit hardening, reinforcement, new substations, etc.) or new investment alternatives, such as DERs.
Heleno, Miguel [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborat↗
Solar and battery can reduce energy costs and provide affordable outage backup for US households
Distributed energy resources are promising solutions for household energy affordability and resilience as weather extremes and aging infrastructure intensify grid reliability risks. This study presents a comprehensive nationwide assessment of over 500,000 U.S. households, evaluating economic and backup viability of solar-battery systems. We find that 60% of households could reduce electricity costs with average savings of 15%, while 63% of households could achieve affordable backup power during power outages covering an average of 51% of their essential energy needs. However, these benefits show limited alignment with areas of greatest need, particularly in regions facing high outage risks. We also identify significant disparities in access to solar and battery, with less-populated and disadvantaged communities showing consistently lower viability. Furthermore, these findings demonstrate the need for targeted policy interventions to ensure equitable access to solar-battery benefits, especially as states transition from net energy metering to other electricity tariff policies.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
Current Best Practices on Wildfire Risk Reduction for Electric Transmission and Distribution Systems
This report provides a set of best practices in response to Section 4(d) of Executive Order 14308, Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response. The information contained herein is expected to be used in conjunction with other materials at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Wildfire Risk Mitigation Technical Conference (Docket No. AD25-16-000), with possible direction to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to take action. The objective of this report is to provide an overview of existing and emerging best practices currently employed or planned by utilities for wildfire mitigation, demonstrating how these efforts align with the executive order’s emphasis on reducing electric utility–caused wildfires while also balancing cost-effectiveness. Additionally, while most practices in utility-developed wildfire mitigation plans focus on risk reduction through robustness and operational reliability, this report also discusses best practices for resilience. The best practices are adopted from publicly available utility wildfire mitigation plans from the United States and Canada, recent findings from wildfire risk reduction research, and industry engagement.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Hybrid Energy Systems: Opportunities for Coordinated Research
This chapter presents a baseline assessment of DOE’s current portfolio related to hybrid systems that produce electricity as their only output (Track 1), within the context of the key challenges facing these systems. Of particular importance is that this chapter is focused on understanding what makes a hybrid different from two standalone technologies, both in terms of the research being performed and the challenges that ongoing and planned research will seek to overcome. The purpose of summarizing and describing current research areas is to identify opportunities DOE could consider supporting in the near term. DOE encompasses several offices, each of which has unique objectives and is financially constrained. Additionally, the emergence of low-cost hybrid resources presents an array of new opportunities for the electricity sector, including better managing and allocating risk, improving operating performance, reducing system costs, and enhancing reliability and resilience. Realizing these opportunities will require overcoming barriers to the deployment of hybrids through targeted R&D which multiple DOE offices can invest in and benefit from.
42 ENGINEERING↗
Offshore lightning more active and intense in U.S. East Coast wind areas than in North Sea
Fast winds over open areas off the U.S. East Coast resulted in many offshore areas being opened for wind power deployment. Yet lightning is active in this same general area. Lightning damage has been noted as the leading cause of unplanned downtime of wind farms. Here we use lightning observations from 2020–2022 to quantify lightning activity—U.S. East Coast Wind Lease and Wind Planning areas received about 14-times the lightning strokes and about 18-times the energy transfer compared to the operational wind farms in the North Sea. A strong north-south U.S. gradient of lightning exists : low off the coast of Maine, growing higher off Chesapeake Bay, and high south of Virginia. Very high lightning activity also occurs about 250 km from the U.S. coastline, which is 50–100 km outside currently designated Wind Areas but likely relevant to planning floating wind farms further from shore. International lightning protection standards, such as IEC 614200-24, use lightning stroke density and turbine top-height to estimate damage to wind turbines, but it remains unclear if such standards could protect U.S. offshore wind turbines in active lightning areas where the turbine top-height can be 100 m taller than the next tallest object for tens to hundreds of kilometers. This analysis suggests U.S. East Coast offshore wind farms will be subjected to much higher lightning stroke and lightning energy densities than the North Sea counterparts. Preparing the turbine designs in anticipation of these more active U.S. lightning risks will help foster wind’s growing contribution to a reliable and resilient low-carbon energy future.
lightning↗
Characterization of Harsh Environments, At-Risk Microgrid Components, and Hardening Technologies (Report Version 0.1)
Microgrid implementation can help improve electrical service, reliability, and resilience for localized communities. However, they may be susceptible to damage from natural disasters and extreme weather events, which often coincide with times of greater community dependence on microgrids due to likely increased vulnerability of equipment on the main grid. Microgrid equipment can be protected against these hazards through various hardening techniques. The selection of hardening mitigations may depend on the actual risk of the hazard in the specific location and for the specific type of system, as well as cost and feasibility factors. This report summarizes a framework that can be used to characterize risk to a microgrid system from a list of natural hazards enumerated by FEMA. We also describe hardening techniques and mitigations that can be used for specific energy generation, storage, loads, and power delivery elements within a microgrid.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Workshop Report: Rural Electric Cooperative Distributed Energy Resource Business Model Development Workshops
The United States' energy future is being shaped by decades of technology innovation, rapidly changing consumer requirements, and governmental focus on securing reliable, low-cost energy sources. With expanded electrification and increased emphasis on grid reliability coupled with the heightened complexity and risks associated with transmission infrastructure, the use of distributed energy resources (DERs) is more commonly being considered a safe, efficient, and cost-effective way to maintain grid resilience and reliability. Amidst improvements in performance, decreasing costs, and unprecedented federal policy support for DERs, electric cooperatives are considering new opportunities to use these assets to ensure secure and reliable operations for millions of customers. In light of these developments, a series of workshops were held to collaborate on the development of business models for DERs in rural electric cooperative ecosystems. The first workshop was held July 11, 2024, at the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc. headquarters in Westminster, Colorado (hereafter referred to as the "Tri-State Workshop"). The second workshop was hosted by PNGC Power on Oct. 9, 2024, in Portland, Oregon (hereafter referred to as the "PNGC Power Workshop"). These workshops convened representatives from G&Ts, distribution cooperatives,2 the energy industry, the financial community, the U.S. government, national and regional organizations, and national laboratories to share perspectives on the unique needs, challenges, and opportunities that they face as DERs are further integrated into the grid. The workshops were designed to address the following objectives: (1) develop the enabling attributes of electric cooperative DER business models, (2) explore pathways for generating community benefits from these assets, and (3) identify technical challenges and market risks for DERs in rural electric cooperative service territories. This report outlines key findings and major themes identified by workshop participants that federal agencies, G&Ts, distribution cooperatives, and other entities can consider to advance electric cooperative DER business models.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Risk-Based Dynamic Contingency Analysis Applied to Puerto Rico Electric Infrastructure
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Electricity and Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy have funded DOE National Laboratories to perform modeling, analysis, and high-level design of resilience-enhancement options for the power grid of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the national laboratories contributing to the DOE effort. Under this funding, PNNL completed Phase I of their analysis in 2018, which identified high-priority transmission enhancements derived from detailed dynamic cascading analysis of severe contingencies, including a hurricane scenario example. This report describes additional analysis completed under Phase II, which was performed over 2019. The PNNL team applied decades of experience making complex power systems more resilient, reliable, secure, flexible, affordable and sustainable, with partners in government and industry. In this report, PNNL presents the Phase II analysis, in which a risk-based dynamic contingency analysis approach to evaluate impact of several hurricane scenarios was developed. This approach was used to identify high-priority enhancements and test resilience mitigation actions, including the evaluation of high-solar scenarios developed as a result of the 2019 Puerto Rico Integrated Resource Plan (IRP).
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Cybersecurity Resiliency of Marine Renewable Energy Systems Part 2: Cybersecurity Best Practices and Risk Management
Marine renewable energy (MRE) is an emerging source of power for marine applications, marine devices, and coastal communities. This energy source relies on industrial control systems and IT to support operations and maintenance activities, which create a pathway for an adversary to gain unauthorized access to systems and data and disrupt operations. Incorporating cybersecurity risk prevention measures and mitigation capabilities from inception, development, operation, to decommissioning of the MRE system and components is paramount to the protection of energy generation and the security of network architecture and infrastructure. To improve the resilience of MRE systems as a predictable, affordable, and reliable source of energy, cybersecurity guidance was developed to enable operators to assess cybersecurity risks and implement security measures commensurate with the risk. This publication is the second of a two-part series, with Part 1 addressing a framework to determine cybersecurity risk by assessing the vulnerability of an MRE system to potential cyber threats and the consequences a cyberattack would have on the end user. This Part 2 publication describes an approach to select appropriate cybersecurity best practices commensurate with the MRE system's cybersecurity risk. The guidance includes 86 cybersecurity best practices, which are associated with 36 cybersecurity domains and grouped into nine categories. The best practices follow the core functions of the National Institute of Science and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (e.g., identify, detect, protect, respond, and and recover) and insights from both maritime and energy industry guidance documents to identify security measures effective in protecting information and operational technology assets prevalent in MRE systems.
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
Residential Vehicle-to-Home Backup Power Capabilities: Key Findings from a ComEd Beneficial Electrification R&D Pilot
This report summarizes key findings from a collaborative technical study of residential, non-grid-tied vehicle-to-home (V2H) backup power systems in Commonwealth Edison’s (ComEd’s) service territory. The work integrates (1) a feeder-level technoeconomic analysis (TEA) using historical outage-event data and simulated electric-vehicle (EV) driving/charging profiles to estimate potential reliability and customer interruption-cost impacts under V2H and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) adoption scenarios; (2) controlled laboratory performance testing of a representative V2H backup ecosystem to characterize transfer-to-backup behavior, sustained power delivery, efficiency trends, and repeatable reliability limitations; and (3) a cybersecurity assessment aligned with NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 and ISO/SAE 21434 to evaluate interface-level risk drivers and identify program-relevant mitigations. Results indicate that V2H can provide measurable resilience value, but outcomes are strongly context dependent on outage patterns and the share of events that are “V2H-applicable.” Typical transfer-to-backup behavior clustered on the order of minutes, but rare long-delay edge cases were observed (including an event approaching 30 minutes) and should be treated as a reliability risk. High-power testing showed that peak-rated output is not necessarily continuously deliverable; stable operation may require operation below nameplate ratings and attention to thermal and installation constraints. The cybersecurity assessment highlights a broad attack surface spanning commissioning, home networks, embedded services, and cloud/OTA pathways, motivating minimum controls for secure onboarding, signed updates, patch cadence, and coordinated vulnerability response for any scaled deployment.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Oilwell Conversion (Well API 121913310501) to Geothermal Heat Storage Well for Flexible Electricity Storage
Geothermal growth is limited by a lack of geographically dispersed high-temperature thermal resources and high initial upfront investment in characterization and well construction. This project intended to address the challenges of energy supply intermittency and enhance grid resilience, reliability, and energy security by storing energy provided from currently available renewable resources in the subsurface to harvest it a later time during at-peak energy demand. This project intended to improve geothermal adoption, reduce initial project risk, and improve price competitiveness through utilizing existing oil and gas infrastructure such as non-productive wells, non-economic fields, dry holes, and orphaned wells. The project also intended to address the lack of geographically dispersed thermal resources and enhance grid resilience, reliability, and energy security by introducing an economical method for storing energy from currently available renewable resources in the subsurface for usage during at-peak energy demand. During this research, the project furthered the understanding of the feasibility of utilizing abandoned oil and gas wells as geothermal heat storage wells. The project team investigated the heat storage and hydrogeological characteristics of subsurface reservoirs in the Illinois Basin to evaluate their response to heat injection for determining the evolution of temperature profiles and heat losses over time using existing and available data sets. The project team then performed modeling and simulation to evaluate the heat losses of returning fluids during heat extraction. The outputs were used to select an optimal candidate reservoir and location in Southern Illinois. The team designed and performed a small-scale field test in an existing oil well to refine the model and to demonstrate the permitting and regulatory pathways necessary for the conversion of oil and gas assets to geothermal use. The field test also serves as a proof of concept and can guide the procedures for future research and implementation. Additionally, the project team, conducted initial market research and customer discovery to develop a go to market strategy for an Advanced Geothermal Energy Storage (AGES) system. The project team in this research also identified the parameters to be refined in future research, to improve the current go to market strategy economic model. To this end several subject matter experts were also identified to assist in future research with geothermal infrastructure setup, energy storage policy and law, energy storage market demand, potential siting based on demand etc. Future research will involve further sophistication of the site commercial modeling, implementing a larger-scale test, and further refinement of the thermodynamic modeling/simulation process. The output will be lifecycle costs and economics suitable for comparison to alternative approaches from a validated full-scale demonstration for venture capital investment into this technology. The project successfully demonstrated the ability to leverage existing oilfield infrastructure, permits, and land access and leasing agreements, to enable geothermal storage projects to come online faster and cheaper than a greenfield development could. This technology could allow for greater energy independence and security through long-term energy storage solutions. The longer duration allows for greater storage for renewables currently limited by hours-long storage durations of lithium-ion. The AGES system would support the growth of renewable energy farms, and provide greater opportunities for a cleaner energy infrastructure.
15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗