12. THE RESILIENCE OF US ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE
diversifying supply chains to reduce the risks against various disruptions can all help enhance the overall level of resilience in the energy sector.
Resilience in electricity
Outages caused by extreme weather events in the United States provide an indication of the vulnerability of the energy infrastructure, notably of electricity grids. Lessons learned from hurricanes are plentiful and have helped to render infrastructure more secure and safe.
Established after the North American blackout in 2003, NERC regularly assesses risks to the bulk power system by conducting regular short-term and long-term reliability assessments under the supervision of FERC, and in close collaboration with industry, market participants and the DOE (see also Emergency Response section in Chapter 9, “Electricity”) (NERC, 2017). NERC co-ordinates action across regions, the so-called reliability councils, which cover several interconnected systems, including areas in Canada. NERC ensures the reliability of the bulk power system by setting harmonised reliability standards across the United States and Canada, including the following:
transmission planning: specifies transmission planning requirements for ensuring the bulk system will operate reliably for future forecast scenarios across normal and credible contingency conditions
protection and control: specifies protection and control performance requirements to ensure operational reliability of the bulk system
critical infrastructure protection: specifies requirements for identifying and protecting critical electric power sector infrastructure across a broad range of potential threats
generation and load balancing: specifies performance requirements for ensuring system frequency remains within acceptable ranges as supply resources balance supply in real time
transmission operation: specifies requirements to ensure that the transmission system is scheduled, operated and monitored to ensure operational reliability
interconnection reliability operations and co-ordination: specifies co-ordination requirements to ensure operational reliability across regions of the interconnected power system
emergency preparedness and operations: specifies requirements to ensure a return to reliable operation as efficiently as possible after wide-area system disturbances.
Over the past years, the DOE and NERC have evaluated the impacts of possible gas supply disruptions on electricity security, amid the fast growth of natural gas-fired power generation, although without a focus on improving the resilience of the gas infrastructure itself. Most recently, NERC issued “Special reliability assessment: Potential bulk power system impacts due to severe disruptions on the natural gas system” in November 2017. In 2018, FERC opened a generic proceeding on bulk power resilience.
The DOE’s Grid Modernization Initiative also assesses resilience across the strongly integrated North American energy system more broadly. Specifically, the initiative co-ordinates across the DOE and collaborates with public and private partners to
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ENERGY SECURITY
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