Power System Supply Resilience: The Need for Definitions and Metrics in Decision-Making

Resilience is a fundamental and important subject with numerous viewpoints and definitions. A significant challenge is to fit existing definitions used by other industries into metric definitions, performance targets, and calculation steps that are practical and implementable for an electric power system, so that entities responsible for planning and operating the electric power system may improve.

This white paper does not attempt to provide the answers for defining and ensuring power system resilience. Instead, it evaluates only one aspect of power system resilience—the availability and supply of power, energy, and a set of power-supply-related reliability services—and provides insights about how the many definitions may be linked to actionable metrics for four practice areas: planning, operations, restoration, and market design. It summarizes how power system organizations may achieve supply resilience and explores potential future improvements.

Date Published: 18 August 2020

Authors : The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) prepared this report. This report describes research sponsored by EPRI and was reviewed by the following experts• Elise Caplan, Jack Cashin, American Public Power Association • Jonathon Monken, Converge Strategies • Michael Purdie, Dominion Energy • Rob Gramlich, Grid Strategies • Tongxin Zheng and Mingguo Hong, ISO New England • Gary Helm and Natalie Tacka, PJM • John Moura, North American Electric Reliability Corporation • Carl Pechman, National Regulatory Research Institute • Andrea Staid, Sandia National Laboratory • Kevin Berent, Michael Caravaggio, Adam Diamant, Delavane Diaz, Laura Fischer, Anish Gaikwad, Katie Jereza, Eamonn Lannoye, Paul Myrda, Aidan Tuohy, and Eknath Vittal, EPRI

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