SEPA Resilience Playbook for States and Utilities
Research

SEPA Resilience Playbook for States and Utilities

  • Methodologies and frameworks for grid resilience planning.
  • New methods to improve energy planning by overlaying natural hazard, environmental justice, and equity maps with distribution planning.
  • Best practices to prioritize customers and critical facilities for resilience solutions via innovative partnerships and business models.
  • State and federal energy equity and environmental justice initiatives impacting resilience funding in disadvantaged communities.
  • Collaboration opportunities among key stakeholders to secure funding and improve the benefit-cost analysis of resilience projects.

SEPA’s Resilience Planning Playbook provides state energy offices and utilities with a starting point to address the role of distribution system resilience in the clean energy transition. This playbook utilizes traditional electric utility best practices (e.g., system reliability and capacity planning) and emerging best practices (e.g., environmental justice, energy equity, and critical infrastructure considerations) to help states and utilities understand the tools needed to ensure resilience in light of changing customer needs and demands.  It introduces various tools for improving resilience planning (e.g., grid modernization, grid hardening, and distributed energy resources).

In 2020, the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) developed The Microgrid Playbook to support the industry in addressing community resilience to natural hazard risks via microgrid deployment. SEPA’s latest “Resilience Playbook for States and Utilities” builds on this resource and our experience working directly with our state energy offices and utility members across the country. This playbook focuses on distribution system planning concepts, disadvantaged communities, and the vital coordination of stakeholders and data sharing to identify resilience needs and funding opportunities to prioritize investments successfully.

For more information on how customer-sited and grid-scale DERs can increase resilience, download SEPA’s complementary resource, “Reimagining Resilience: Customer-Sited and Grid-Scale DER Framework.”

Authors:

Upcoming:

SEPA partnered with NRECA to co-develop a “Resilience Planning Playbook for Electric Cooperative Utilities.” If you are interested in partnering with SEPA on resilience and microgrid efforts, please contact Mac Keller ([email protected]), and stay tuned for more in the coming months.

SEPA Resilience Playbook for States and Utilities