New Article: Maintaining Critical Infrastructure Resilience to Natural Hazards During the COVID-19 Pandemic
August 31, 2020
Already under strain from the COVID-19 pandemic, we are experiencing a steady stream of overlapping natural disasters with wildfires on the west coast and hurricanes impacting the east coast. These natural disasters are only expected to increase in frequency and intensity which raises questions for how the US energy sector will keep critical infrastructure up and running during natural hazard events.
With a combination of events that would have been considered outlandish in an exercise five years ago, the overlapping disasters of the last few months should bring a greater sense of urgency to resilience work across the critical infrastructure sectors. Given the simultaneous timing of these events and the breadth of their impact, a risk-based, hazard agnostic approach is more vital than ever to ensuring energy resilience solutions are capable of reducing the impact of future disasters.
The recently published,“Maintaining Critical Infrastructure Resilience to Natural Hazards During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” examines how the regional transmission operator PJM is approaching resilience from a sociotechnical perspective to prepare for natural disasters during the COVID-19 pandemic and identifies several recommendations for strengthening resilience. The report was written by Converge Strategies own Jonathon Monken alongside Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, Ismael Arciniegas Rueda, Jay Liu, and Hong Chen.
Published in: Journal of Infrastructure Preservation and Resilience (2020). doi: 10.1186/s43065-020-00010-1
“RAND’s work in bringing the socio-technical aspect of grid resilience to the discussion is an essential part of ensuring we can develop hazard mitigation strategies that go beyond infrastructure and truly understand the underlying causes of our resilience vulnerabilities.
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— Jonathon Monken, Converge Strategies