Current Practices in Distribution Utility Resilience Planning for Winter Storms

Summary

This August 2024 report by NREL analyzes current practices in U.S. distribution utility resilience planning for winter storms, highlighting challenges like increasing event frequency and new storm characteristics causing outages for millions, as seen with Winter Storm Uri impacting 4.5 million Texans. Utilities are investing significantly, with Niagara Mohawk spending $863 million on storm hardening and $99.6 million on resilience from 2020 to 2024, and Unitil allocating $1.897 million annually to its Storm Resilience Program, resulting in $1.02 million in avoided costs. The analysis underscores the need for standardized, hazard-specific metrics and forward-looking threat risk analyses to improve cost-effective investment prioritization, noting a FEMA investment of $24 million in Minnesotan cooperatives for disaster recovery between 1999 and 2011.

Key Facts

Source Document

https://example-government.gov/policy-document-link