Sandy Regional Assembly Recovery Agenda

On January 26, 2013, nearly 200 participants representing over 40 community, environmental justice, labor and civic groups from across New York City, New Jersey and Long Island -- from the neighborhoods most impacted by Superstorm Sandy, and most vulnerable to future storm surges convened the Sandy Regional Assembly to strategize how government officials should implement a Sandy rebuilding program.In April 2013, these groups presented their Sandy Regional Assembly Recovery Agenda -- the first regional grassroots Sandy rebuilding and resiliency plan. The Recovery Agenda was a mix of suggested capital projects and policy recommendations, designed to advance 3 goals:Integrate regional rebuilding efforts with local resiliency priorities;Strengthen vulnerable communities & reduce public health threats, andExpand community-based climate change planning, disaster preparedness & response

POWER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM RELIABILITY AND RESILIENCY AGAINST EXTREME EVENTS

The objective of a power system is to provide electricity to its customers as economically as possible with an acceptable level of reliability while safeguarding the environment. Power system reliability has well-established quantitative metrics, regulatory standards, compliance incentives and jurisdictions of responsibilities. The increase in occurrence of extreme events like hurricane/tornadoes, floods, wildfires, storms, cyber-attacks etc. which are not considered in routine reliability evaluation has raised concern over the potential economic losses due to prolonged and large-scale power outages, and the overall sustainability and adaptability of power systems. This concern has motivated the utility planners, operators, and policy makers to acknowledge the importance of system resiliency against such events. However, power system resiliency evaluation is comparatively new, and lacks widely accepted standards, assessment methods and metrics. The thesis presents comparative review and analysis of power system resilience models, methodologies, and metrics in present literature and utility applications. It presents studies on two very different types of extreme events, (i) man-made and (ii) natural disaster, and analyzes their impacts on the resiliency of a distribution system. It draws conclusions on assessing and improving power system resiliency based on the impact of the extreme event, response from the distribution system, and effectiveness of the mitigating measures to tackle the extreme event. The advancement in technologies has seen an increasing integration of cyber and physical layer of the distribution system. The distribution system operators avails from the symbiotic relation of the cyber-physical layer, but the interdependency has also been its Achilles heel. The evolving infrastructure is being exposed to increase in cyber-attacks. It is of paramount importance to address the aforementioned issue by developing holistic approaches to comprehensibly upgrade the distribution system preventing huge financial loss and societal repercussions. The thesis models a type of cyber-attack using false data injection and evaluates its impact on the distribution system. It does so by developing a resilience assessment methodology accompanied by quantitative metrics. It also performs reliability evaluation to present the underlying principle and differences between reliability and resiliency. The thesis also introduces new indices to demonstrate the effectiveness of a bad-data detection strategy against such cyber-attacks. Extreme events like hurricane/tornadoes, floods, wildfires, storm, cyber-attack etc. are responsible for catastrophic damage to critical infrastructure and huge financial loss. Power distribution system is an important critical infrastructure driving the socio-economic growth of the country. High winds are one of the most common form of extreme events that are responsible for outages due to failure of poles, equipment damage etc. The thesis models effective extreme wind events with the help of fragility curves, and presents an analysis of their impacts on the distribution system. It also presents infrastructural and operational resiliency enhancement strategies and quantifies the effectiveness of the strategy with the metrics developed. It also demonstrates the dependency of resiliency of distribution system on the structural strength of transmission lines and presents measures to ensure the independency of the distribution system. The thesis presents effective resilience assessment methodology that can be valuable for distribution system utility planners, and operators to plan and ensure a resilient distribution system

A review of microgrid development in the United States – A decade of progress on policies, demonstrations, controls, and software tools

Microgrids have become increasingly popular in the United States. Supported by favorable federal and local policies, microgrid projects can provide greater energy stability and resilience within a project site or community. This paper reviews major federal, state, and utility-level policies driving microgrid development in the United States. Representative U.S. demonstration projects are selected and their technical characteristics and non-technical features are introduced. The paper discusses trends in the technology development of microgrid systems as well as microgrid control methods and interactions within the electricity market. Software tools for microgrid design, planning, and performance analysis are illustrated with each tool's core capability. Finally, the paper summarizes the successes and lessons learned during the recent expansion of the U.S. microgrid industry that may serve as a reference for other countries developing their own microgrid industries

WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE: HOW THE WEAK POINTS OF THE POWER GRID LEAVE THE UNITED STATES WITH AN UNACCEPTABLE RISK

Federal regulations aim to ensure grid reliability and harden it against outages; however, widespread outages continue. This thesis examines the spectrum of regulations to evaluate them. It outlines their structure, the regulations’ intent, and weighs them against evolving cyber and physical threats and natural disaster risks. Currently, the regulatory structure is incapable of providing uniform security. Federal standards protect only the transmission portion of the grid, leaving the distribution section vulnerable to attack due to varying regulations from state to state, or county to county. The regulations cannot adapt quickly enough to meet dynamic threats, rendering them less effective. Cyber threats can be so agile that protectors are unaware of vulnerabilities, and patching requirements are too lengthy, which increases the risk exposure. No current weather mitigation or standard is capable of protecting the grid despite regular natural disasters that cause power shutdowns. The thesis concludes that bridging these gaps requires not increasing protection standards, but redundancy. Redundancy, mirrored after the UK's infrastructure policy, is more likely to reduce failure risk through layered components and systems. Microgrids are proven effective in disasters to successfully deliver such redundancy and should be implemented across all critical infrastructure sectors.Civilian, Department of Homeland SecurityApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited