Utility Resilience Programs White Paper

Energy resilience is becoming increasingly important to federal agencies for maintaining operations during extreme weather events and power outages and for improving the overall resilience posture of their sites. However, improving resilience can be an expensive undertaking, especially for the federal government. This is because resilience strategies include systems that often have complex designs and high upfront costs that federal agencies cannot cover solely through direct funding or appropriations.

Connecting federal agencies with their serving utilities on resilience strategies may help to implement resilience projects without reliance on appropriated funds. New utility programs are coming online that encourage utility-customer partnerships for cost-sharing resilience strategies that benefit both parties. In this paper, we present a landscape analysis of utility resilience programs and provide examples of what a handful of utilities are currently offering to promote energy resilience at customer sites and across the power grid.