Report: As power grids rapidly transform, cooperation is needed to mitigate risks

As residential and transportation technology continues to evolve, the demand for power is increasing exponentially. This demand comes at a time when power producers are grappling with the unprecedented challenges of climate change and the impacts of increasingly devastating severe weather events. 

An annual report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation outlines five “significant evolving and interdependent risks—energy policy, grid transformation, resilience to extreme events, security risks and critical infrastructure interdependencies” administrators must overcome.

“Energy policy is a new risk profile and has broad implications across the risk profiles, the report notes, as it catalyzes changes and has the potential to amplify their effects. Consequently, energy policy can drive change in bulk power system (BPS) planning and operations in short time periods, affecting reliability and resilience,” reads a statement about the findings from the reliability corporation, which is a not-for-profit international regulatory authority. 

The analysis, titled the 2023 ERO Reliability Risk Priorities Report, highlights a need to coordinate with federal, regional, and state policy makers, and owners and operators of power systems. Collaboration is key to future reliability—and this trend will only grow in importance as climate change incrasingly impacts systems.

The grid “depends on and is impacted by other infrastructure providers: Interdependencies between other industries (e.g., water and communications) and fuel types for generation are vital for reliability,” the report says. “The increase in natural gas and renewable variable energy generation and the simultaneous decline in nuclear, natural gas, oil, and coal-fired generation have implications on the resource adequacy and the dynamic performance of the BPS (bulk power system).”

It’s not just environmental stressors that are ramping up a need for collaboration. Digital security threats have spiked in recent years, with cybercriminals targeting public entities more often than ever. Cybersecurity is an expansive endeavor. Threat actors can gain access to a system via many different kinds of vulnerabilities, even if they aren’t directly under control of the victimized organization. Collaboration is imperative so that everyone is on the same page, and can be alerted to threats before they break through.

While the grid is rapidly transforming to keep up with emerging technologies, reliability needs to keep pace.

“With the accelerated pace of integrating new resources on the BPS, sufficient effort is needed to develop new system models, more advanced tools, and grid infrastructure improvements for their reliable and resilient integration,” the report continues. “Development of credible and centralized data sharing along with the right tools to proactively analyze system conditions towards development of mitigations is becoming more critical.”