Accenture: From reliability to resilience

Accenture has released a new report, “From Reliability to Resilience.” Climate-impacting events around the world are becoming more frequent and severe, and most electric utilities remain unprepared for the increasing operational pressures.

Despite growing discussion about resilience in executive offices and industry-focused literature, only about a quarter (24%) of more than 200 utility executives surveyed by Accenture as part of its Global Digital Grid Research survey believe they are adequately prepared for the challenges of extreme weather events. The survey included executives responsible for networks, smart grids, energy/power delivery, operations/grid operations, system planning, distribution and more.

For many years, electric utilities have focused primarily on grid reliability, however, this approach alone is no longer sufficient to meet the needs of utilities and society as a whole, especially when one considers the bigger picture. When a utility faces extreme weather and disaster events, things can quickly deteriorate. Greater resilience is the answer. The key is being able to successfully shift from a reliability-centric strategy to a resilience-centric one.

The complicating factor is that resilience has until now remained an amorphous concept in the utility industry. With no standard, widely accepted definition of resilience by the industry or regulators, the task falls to utilities. From Reliability to Resilience: Take the lead in developing appropriate incentives, metrics, and modeling to meet the challenges of extreme weather, and lay the foundation for a collaborative approach between regulators, customers, and utilities. This requires a new, forward-looking, holistic strategy that is data-based, digitally driven, and focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy.

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