Whether it’s record-breaking heat in the Pacific Northwest, a deep freeze in Texas or a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, it’s been hard to find a month that hasn’t featured concerning news about our nation’s energy industry and critical infrastructure.
In light of those pressures, the country is poised for an infrastructure improvement evolution whenever Congress can come to an agreement on funding it. But it’s important to remember that infrastructure improvement is not just about fixing potholes and securing and replacing bridges. Infrastructure improvement also has to stand on the tenets of improving other aspects of life necessities, including the energy grid’s security, resilience and reliability.
It’s time to debate modern solutions instead of trying to make the grid of the past somehow sustain the demand of the future.
While the term reliability seems to speak for itself as a measure of consistently delivering energy resources such as electricity to customers, it’s interesting to note that the industry’s standard performance metrics don’t take into account large disruptive events such as hurricanes. So that self-assessment isn’t necessarily consumer-centric. Currently, there’s no accepted definition of resiliency in the industry, yet grid resiliency is increasingly taking center stage because it is a measure of how quickly and effectively the grid can return to normal operations after any major disruption, be it a cyberattack or a nor’easter. Resiliency is as essential to future prosperity as the energy the utilities are supplying.
These are modern problems. It’s time to debate modern solutions instead of trying to make the grid of the past somehow sustain the demand of the future. A few constructive suggestions for the industry to kick off that debate:
- Invest in robust, cutting-edge cybersecurity tools. The Internet of Things has allowed for more efficiency, better asset management and improved customer service, but it also opens the grid to cyberattacks. Customers shouldn’t suffer brownouts or blackouts because the industry didn’t invest in protecting itself.
- Reevaluate risk modeling. As experts tell us, and as we’ve seen firsthand, the number of extreme weather events will continue to increase. Instead of planning capacity and setting prices by assuming the skies are always blue, the industry and regulators should start working severe weather projections into their plans.
- Consider decentralization. Increasing amounts of energy resources hooked to the grid, combined with the computing power it takes to keep it all humming, create greater vulnerability to hacking. Separating grids could increase resiliency.
- Modernize the grid to allow for a bidirectional feed. The grid of tomorrow needs to handle smart energy devices and renewable energy to balance supply and demand in real time.
None of the solutions to power our future is easy, and none is cheap. But until we become realistic about what our future energy needs are and what changes we need to implement to meet them, we should expect a steady news diet of weather disasters and cyber disruptions of our critical infrastructure.
