Emerging Smart Grid Struggles - Smart Grid (R) Evolution: Electric Power Struggles - page 1

1 Emerging Smart Grid Struggles
1.1 Vulnerability and Change
At the end of October 2012, more than eight million homes lost power as Superstorm
Sandy battered the east coast of the United States. The electricity system disruption from
this extreme weather event impacted households and businesses across seventeen states,
including those as far west as Michigan. The storm left some without power for weeks, and
lower Manhattan was in the dark for several days. The storm closed the New York Stock
Exchange, the most powerful market in the world, for two full days, and Broadway shows
were canceled for three consecutive days (Webley 2012 ) . The storm forced evacuation of
critical care patients and premature babies at New York University's hospital to another
hospital in the dark, and flooded substations and downed power lines caused unprecedented
levels of disruption to the city's energy systems. As the disaster unfolded, the vulnerabilities
of the United States' electric system were broadcast to the world.
In the aftermath of the storm, the region struggled to recover and restore electricity.
In some places, the same vulnerable electricity system, with the same basic technologies
and same structure, was reinstalled, demonstrating a common and fundamental irony of
disaster recovery. Although a disruption provides a window of opportunity to upgrade
technology and introduce new approaches to enhance system resilience, established policies
and procedures often require investment in and installation of the same infrastructure.
But Hurricane Sandy also sparked broad societal discussion on the vulnerability of the
electric infrastructure and has encouraged long-term plans and investments to improve
reliability and resilience. Investment decisions after a major disruption represent one of
many emerging struggles of electricity system change. When the Secretary of the United
States Department of Energy, Ernie Moniz, spoke about Hurricane Sandy in his first major
policy speech in August 2013, he said: “we have to help this rebuilding in a smart way”
(Moniz 2013 ) . In this political statement, Moniz was underscoring this critical challenge in
electricity system change. When system disruptions occur, the pressure to “get the lights
back on” surpasses all else. A clear tension exists between the immediate need to recover
from an outage and the longer-term need for changes to move toward a future system that is
more reliable and resilient. Rarely have electric utilities been able to use outage and system
disruptions as opportunities to upgrade and update their technologies.