Resilience of Electric Power Infrastructure

Abstract Electric power resilience addresses preparedness of the system and its ability to cope with various hazards that can disrupt electricity. Resilience is the ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a disruptive event. Many things can be done to improve the overall resilience of the power system. These include hardening critical components, increasing the modularity and interoperability of components (making quick replacement and restoration more efficient), and changing the overall architecture of the system to reduce the criticality of individual components. The system should be designed such that it has inherent properties of resilience: bend without breaking, fail with minimal disruption, and enable fast restoration and recovery. Resilient design concepts are rooted in the understanding that it is possible to design a system to a wide range of hazards, even those that are not enumerated or even imagined. This chapter provides a broad perspective of these issues.