Findings and recommendations to enhance the resilience of the nation's electric power grid were released in a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Jeff Dagle, chief engineer at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory served on a committee charged with recommending strategies and priorities for how the nation can move to a more reliable and resilient transmission and distribution system.

Dagle is one of 17 committee members - and the sole national laboratory representative - that authored the NAS report titled "Enhancing the Resiliency of the Nation's Electric Power Transmission and Distribution System."

Dagle will join committee chair Dr. M. Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University and Bill Sanders of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in a webinar at 2:00 p.m. EDT on July 20 to outline the results. The report was presented to Congress and the Department of Energy on July 19.

"Reliability and resilience are closely related but while reliability focuses on service interruptions, resilience is more difficult to measure," said Dagle. "Resiliency is reducing the magnitude and duration of impact to events, and measuring resilience means that you are measuring things that have not yet occurred. It speaks to preparedness."

Over the past 18 months, the committee considered how existing and emerging technological options, including greater reliance on distributed power generation, could impact the reliability and the ability to recover from disruptions to the system.

"Resilient infrastructure is robust to all hazards, ranging from storms to malicious events," said Dagle. "Even from threats that are not envisioned. That is what makes its design challenging and interesting."

The report also identifies non-technological barriers - regulatory, ownership, and financial issues - to implementation of new or expanded technology to improve the stability, reliability, and resilience of electric transmission and distribution. The committee suggests strategies, key opportunities and priorities, and actions for implementation of the identified technology pathways.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory | www.pnnl.gov