The All Hazards Consortium (AHC) is "a trusted community of industry and government stakeholders solving operational problems through planning, research, and trusted information sharing." They provide resources for key personnel to plan for emergencies, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity. In January 2022, they hosted the National Resilience Exchange Virtual Summit.
As a virtual workshop, organizers decided to host the event over the course of three half-days to make it more accessible. Several hundred participants were able to learn, network, and collaborate with private sector critical infrastructure partners, state and local emergency managers, DHS/CISA, DHS/FEMA/FMCSA, trade associations, academia, industry, and research groups. Each day was broken up to focus on a different topic.
STRATEGIES - Day 1 focused on resilience issues in industry and government and strategies to address them.
INITIATIVES - Day 2 focused on resilience initiatives and projects.
TRAINING - Day 3 focused on training and education for resilience-related solutions, innovations, and research.
I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on a panel on the Operational Research / Resilience in Critical Infrastructure track. The panel, titled "Building Critical Infrastructure Resilience Through Microgrids," moderated by Jake Gentle, a program manager at INL and one of my close mentors. On the panel with me were Josh Mauzey, Senior Manager, Grid Edge Innovation at Southern California Edison (SCE), Colonel John Perkins, Director, Construction and Facility Management Office at Iowa Army National Guard, and Michael Leitman, Director of System Optimization at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA).
Surrounded by these experts with years and years of experience, you may wonder what I would have to contribute to this panel as someone with less than a year of full-time experience, and research experience at that. The perspective I brought to the conversation was one of studying resilience through the lens of renewables.
Our panel description was given as:
With an increase in large generating facilities connecting in new and geographically disperse locations, as well as the rise in the percentage of distributed generation on a single network, extreme weather events and catastrophic disasters like wildfires, microgrids are becoming an important technology for enhancing the electrical energy delivery systems’ resilience and functionality. This panel will discuss the challenges and benefits of microgrids.
If you've poked around my website at all, you'll know this panel description is almost perfectly aligned with my interests and my projects. I was able to share our considerations and reasoning in developing the Resilience Framework for Electric Energy Delivery Systems. I provided specific examples of how distributed wind contributed overall system resilience, and explained how distributed wind in combination with other microgrid elements, like storage or advanced controls methodology significantly enhanced the overall resilience compared to wind alone.
I was honored to be considered to share my perspectives at this event, and to compare my thoughts on resilience with peers and experts as I continue to develop my understanding of the needs, perspectives, and limitations of various stakeholders.