A customer-focused framework for electric system resilience

This paper offers a path for assessing and selecting resilience regulatory policy options for consumer electric systems in the US. Although many discussions of reliability and resilience focus on the bulk power system, this study recommends use of a much broader framework and metrics that are focused on customers’ experiences, rather than the grid alone. In a customer-centric framework, the power system should be viewed end-to-end, spanning from the customer premises (including customer-sited energy efficiency and distributed generation and storage) through distribution and transmission up to power generation and fuel supply. Power system resilience should be measured from the end user’s perspective – how many outages happen (frequency), the number of customers affected by an outage (scale), and the length of time before interrupted service can be restored (duration). And since long outages do occur, this paper recommends that customer survivability should be considered as an important element of resilience preparations.