Concerns about rapid load growth, electric grid reliability and resilience, sustainability, investment needs, and affordability are rising. After decades of low demand growth, electricity consumption is now surging, driven by the proliferation of large data centers and electrification of every economic sector. As a result, communities and the broader economy are becoming increasingly dependent on reliable electricity.
All this is happening while the electric power sector is undergoing its most profound transformation in over a century. New technologies for generation, storage, transmission, distribution, and end use—many of which are digital and interconnected—are rapidly entering the grid. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are introducing complex new operational dynamics. Moreover, the need to transmit electricity over long distances is increasing.
Resilience Challenges
The Community Solution
The Community Solution
These challenges heighten the impacts of extended outages. Such outages can result from extreme natural events such as severe weather, wildfires, geomagnetic disturbances, and earthquakes—or from human-caused disruptions such as cyber, physical or electromagnetic attacks. Multiple threat events occurring together could lead to even more severe outages.
Current strategies to improve grid resilience—such as hardening, developing recovery plans, fostering utility collaboration, and deploying microgrids—provide important benefits but have significant limitations including interdependence with other critical infrastructure. Further, these approaches are often costly and may protect only specific facilities.
The Community Solution
The Community Solution
The Community Solution
It is neither feasible nor affordable to protect every part of the grid against every possible threat at all times while at the same time meeting rising load growth and all the complex challenges posed by new technologies
To meet these increasing challenges, a community scale grid architecture is needed. This new grid architecture—the Resilient Community Grid—enhances the existing grid architecture, integrates rapidly evolving technologies, meets rising consumer needs and ensures critical services during large-scale outages. Above all, it is affordable.
