As part of the HydroWIRES Initiative, a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory-led team developed a report highlighting the importance of hydropower to increasing the U.S. electricity grid’s resilience and enhancing its ability to respond to and recover from extreme events. An accompanying framework and toolkit also allow grid operators, regulators, and policy analysts to assess hydropower’s role under various extreme grid conditions. The project team also included experts from Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The report outlines hydropower’s characteristics that enable grid resilience and identifies methods, tools, models, and data to analyze hydropower’s impact on resilience. Insights from this report exemplify hydropower’s essential role in stabilizing the grid after sudden, large losses of energy generation and extreme weather impacts. The report also highlights hydropower’s storage capabilities and flexibility as critical assets for ensuring grid reliability during extreme weather events.