How to Prepare the Power Grid for Any Hazard (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video How to Prepare the Power Grid for Any Hazard.

This video outlines how NREL technologies help prepare the power grid for natural disasters and cyberattacks.

[Music plays, narrator speaks.]

We don't wait till a flood happens to start building levees. Or decide to evacuate in the middle of a hurricane.

Instead, we prepare. Which is exactly what the energy system needs to support national security, economic growth, and our everyday lives—without interruption.

Our energy systems are experiencing change from all directions. New risks, technologies, connections, and consequences.

The only way to create energy resilience in such uncertain and complex scenarios, is with an environment that can emulate the scale and complexity of rapidly evolving natural and man-made hazards. And the most advanced environment for evaluating these compounding scenarios is at NREL.

A combination of current energy assets, connected to modeling and visualization tools makes multidimensional hazard analysis possible. It allows utilities, emergency responders, state energy offices, technology developers, government agencies, and other stakeholders to prepare for any scenario.

These groups face uncertainties from an increasingly complex energy sector and rapidly changing threats—threats that compound each other.

But NREL's growing threat-to-consequence analysis capabilities can put these challenges into broader perspective.

Using NREL's Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems platform, or ARIES, researchers can simulate complete power systems, and their cyber communications during a disaster and subsequent cyberattack to show how we can design for compounded risks.

For example, through advanced modeling, NREL researchers tracked outages of a tropical storm striking the U.S. gulf. In the storm's wake, they simulated an opportunistic cyberattack targeted at transmission and distribution infrastructure.

The back-to-back hazards complicated the recovery, and researchers visualized impacts on homes, critical facilities, and national security functions, showing the need for resilience by design, and top-to-bottom awareness.

With NREL's capability, utilities, operators, system planners, and communities can proactively: study evolving risks, address technology integration challenges, and evaluate new approaches to reducing energy system risk.

By building security and resilience into energy systems, we can be ready for the worst.

To get involved with NREL's energy security and resilience capabilities, visit https://www.nrel.gov/security-resilience/work-with-us.

[Narration ends, music stops.]