Resilience -- I'd Like To Buy An "E" -- February 5, 2018

Resilience; Perhaps, having seen the challenges with the "grid" in Germany and the "grid" in Australia, it appears the "FERC" in the US is introducing a new concept into the discussion: "resilience." Link here at UtilityDive.

In a January 8 order, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission soundly rejected the notion that, to keep the lights on in regions served by bulk power markets, it was necessary to compensate power plants capable of housing 3-month fuel stores. In closing the docket directed by the Department of Energy’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, however, FERC opened a “national conversation” about grid resilience.

Regional Transmission Organizations have 60 days to respond to questions posed by FERC, followed by 30 days of “reply” comments from other stakeholders.

In the new proceeding, FERC proposed that resilience means the “ability to withstand and reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events, which includes the capability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from such an event.”

Resilience is a term commonly used in climate adaptation discussions to describe the ability of a community, industry, or ecosystem to adapt to changing temperatures, precipitation patterns, extreme weather events and sea level rise.

The concept has deep roots in multiple disciplines. In engineering, resilience is — as FERC proposes — the capacity of a steady-state system to return to equilibrium after a disturbance. Another more dynamic definition — what some scholars call ecological resilience — references how much outside force a system can take before it changes structure and begins to follow a different, stable set of rules.

Drawing on both concepts, economic resilience describes the capacity of an economy to recover or recreate itself after a shock, in ways that mitigate aggregate losses and negative distributional impacts. 

It's an opinion piece, but does provide some insight into where the discussion is headed. You can bet the wind/solar folks will have a place at the table. The question is whether "we"  have learned anything from the lessons that Germany, Spain, Denmark, Australia have all learned when it comes to the cost of renewables.