Integration of equitable resilience metrics into climate-informed electric utility planning processes: phase one

Summary

This report summarizes the recently completed first phase of a partnership between Sandia National Laboratories, Southern California Edison (SCE), and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to integrate equitable resilience metrics into electric utility planning. The project evaluated how SCE, serving over 15 million people across a 50,000 square mile area, can use a Social Burden metric, enhanced by SCE's 37-factor Community Resilience Metric (CRM), to inform infrastructure investments. The analysis of 8 hypothetical climate-driven outage scenarios (4 heat, 4 flood) found that less than 1% of critical service locations would be offline in each scenario, and if all 8 occurred, only 2.2% would be impacted. While some localized areas experienced Social Burden increases of up to 49% (Baldwin scenario) and 17% (Laguna scenario), the average increase across all SCE customers was 0.5% or less. This pilot demonstrates the metric's applicability for large-scale resilience planning and highlights next steps for its full integration into utility decision-making.

Key Facts

Source Document

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