Evaluating the cost effectiveness of grid-hardening investments.
Philip Mihlmester (Philip.Mihlmester@icfi.com) is an executive vice president, and Kiran Kumaraswamy (Kiran.Kumaraswamy@icfi.com) is a senior manager with ICF International.
Recent experience has demonstrated that the nation’s electric infrastructure can be highly susceptible to widespread power outages due to severe weather and related events (e.g., hurricanes, winter storms, tornadoes, earthquakes, climate induced changes in sea level, etc.). To this could be added manmade impacts such as physical or cyber-attack. For instance, in 2008 Hurricane Ike caused 2.15 million customer outages in the territory of CenterPoint Energy, while Hurricane Irene caused more than 4.0 million homes and businesses across the Eastern United States to lose power. In June last year a major storm system, Derecho, moved through 11 states and the District of Columbia traveling around 600 miles in 10 hours. Roughly 4.2 million utility customers lost power. It took as many as seven to 10 days to restore power in many cases. More than 2 million customers lost power in New York due to Superstorm Sandy, and a week after the event, more than 200,000 customers were still without power. Figure 1 shows the timeline of power restoration by utilities in New York City following Sandy.
As our economy and well-being are heavily dependent upon electricity, there’s been increasing attention to making our electric system more resilient. This resiliency takes the form of hardening critical infrastructure so it’s less vulnerable to failure, as well as improving response time and decreasing the time it takes to restore electric power if it does go down.