IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2015 - 16

guest editorial

S.S. (Mani) Venkata and Nikos Hatziargyriou

grid resilience
elasticity is needed when facing catastrophes

A

According to the MerriaMWebster Dictionary, the definition of
resilience is as follows:
1: the capability of a strained
body to recover its size and
shape after deformation caused
especially by compressive stress
and 2: an ability to recover from
or adjust easily to misfortune or
change.
the first definition implies any physical body, and the second definition
obviously refers to human beings.
Similar definitions also exist for biology, health, and education. Although
we know what key performance
indexes (KPis) such as reliability,
efficiency, security, and affordability
mean, the term resilience is relatively
new. U.S. Presidential Policy direction
21 defines resilience as "the ability
to prepare for and adapt to changing
conditions and withstand and recover
rapidly from disruptions. resilience
includes the ability to withstand and
recover from deliberate attacks, accidents, or naturally occurring threats or
incidents." More information on this
definition is covered in the first article
in this issue.
in the recent past, there have been
extensive efforts to investigate the importance of resilience as applied to infrastructures in general and electric power
and energy networks in particular. Before
the resilience concept came to the forefront, some utilities in the United States
Digital Object identifier 10.1109/MPe.2015.2401492
Date of publication: 17 april 2015

16

ieee power & energy magazine

Resilience
has also taken
on a deeper
importance
in the wake
of recent
widespread
and major
disturbances.

explored and adopted
the "hardening" concept
to combat hurricanes.
this essentially meant
making needed hardware
changes. Another concept, self-healing, was
also adopted by some
other utilities. now, resilience has also taken on a
deeper importance in the
wake of recent widespread and major disturbances such hurricane
Sandy in the U.S. east
coast; the Fukushima
disaster in Japan due to earthquakes and
the tsunami, cyclones, and tempests in
Asia; and similar catastrophic events in
other parts of the world. Some of the articles in this issue describe many of these
disturbances.
these events result in major blackouts, disrupting the electric supply to
tens, and even hundreds, of million
customers for hours and even days.
these outages are not acceptable since
they upset the normal life of residential
customers, causing significant inconvenience and stress, placing life in danger, and even causing casualties. they
also lead to the loss of supply to critical commercial customers such as hospitals and police stations and the loss
of revenue for industrial customers.
these are recurring events that need to
be addressed and the problems fixed to
make the electric power networks more
resilient against these powerful forces
of nature. these solutions should also

make the grids elastic for
human errors.
We, as coeditors, proposed to dedicate a special
issue on grid and microgrid
resilience, and the ieee
Power & energy Magazine
editorial Board readily
accepted the proposal last
summer. So this issue is
now a reality and includes
six excellent articles about
the ongoing efforts around
the world to provide resilience to electric power
grids that offer potential
practical solutions to catastrophic events.
As the details of these major events are
covered in the articles, they are not covered here. We provide a summary of
these articles for your reading pleasure
with a sincere hope that you will understand the latest developments and ongoing research and development efforts
to improve the resilience of distribution
power grids in various parts of the globe.

The Articles in This Issue
the first article, by dan ton and Paul
Wang, which we consider a must read,
outlines the need, justification, and
r&d plans of the U.S. department
of energy (doe). According to the
authors, the key message is as follows:
"due to the increasing frequency and
intensity of weather-caused grid outages in recent years, the U.S. doe has
placed an added emphasis of r&d on
enhanced climate change and extreme
weather resilience. to forge a focused
may/june 2015



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2015

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2015 - Cover1
IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2015 - Cover2
IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2015 - 1
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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2015 - Cover3
IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2015 - Cover4
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