DER RESILIENCE ADAPTING DER FOR ESSENTIAL RELIABILITY

摘要

In the future, what brought past success to utilities - best effort reliability and affordable rates - will still be required, but will no longer be sufficient. Redefining reliability as resiliency - going beyond outage mitigation or recovery to outage prevention, will allow utilities to focus and strengthen their operational core competency. Starting with critical energy users (i.e., essential operations that must continue during any extended power outage, such as hospitals, police, fire, water, gasoline pumping, etc.) will provide high visibility resiliency for foundational infrastructure for both the society and the economy, and thereby promote long-term sustainability for electric utilities. True Resiliency - outage prevention - is not feasible without onsite energy resources that are not subject to grid outages. Integration of distributed energy resources (DER) will be needed. Redefining the core purpose of high reliability into essential resilience may start with a vision, but will be enabled by a transition plan.