By Dan Gabaldon and Kyle Datta

The energy sector enters a new era transforming energy supply, demand, distribution, resources, infrastructure and technology. It is time for us to rethink the trajectory of our energy systems to ensure resilience while responding to the urgent need for decarbonization, affordability and equity.

Ensuring energy system resilience is a broad initiative that must address a wide range of threats – from hurricanes, fires and freezing temperatures to terrorism and cyberattacks. The industry must heed the sobering lessons learned from the catastrophic energy system failures caused by Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Maria, Superstorm Elliot and Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine’s energy system.

With global experience helping energy clients design systems for the 21st century, Roland Berger has developed a forward-thinking perspective on energy system resilience which can be distilled into nine key considerations that should be top of mind for the industry today, including:

• Integrated Energy Planning: Traditional energy system planning for electric, gas and other systems in isolation has already failed spectacularly. Roland Berger recommends integrating planning for electric, gas, water, communications and emergency response.
• Decarbonization: As we invest over USD 1 trillion per year to build a new decarbonized energy infrastructure, we must also examine how resilience, affordability and equity fit into this mission. Roland Berger believes we should reconsider the aggressive decarbonization timeline, and rely on greater diversification of energy resources.
• Utility Customers: Energy system resilience is ultimately about people. Utility customers suffer the most during outages, particularly in the event of prolonged downtime. Roland Berger proposes that energy systems should be optimized to maintain resilience from a customer-centric perspective, taking into account the cost of replacing the range of indispensable services that energy supports and the valuable benefits it delivers.
• Grid Architecture: The vast majority of weather-related and man-made disruptions impact the distribution grid, and over time, grid outages will only get worse with the growing severity of climate change-induced weather disasters and the rise of quantum computing. The risk posed by these dual threats exposes the limitations of central control and forces us to reimagine the grid architecture using a threat-agnostic strategy.

Roland Berger advocates a hybrid approach to energy system resilience based on four pillars that collectively enable system optimization across infrastructures and the public: fundamental redesign of the grid architecture; leveraging customer assets; next gen IT/OT; and the gas network as backup.

Does resilience pose an enterprise-level risk? This article answers that question and presents some new ways of thinking about energy resilience. Download the full article to learn about all nine hypotheses for building a resilient energy system, and the four pillars of Roland Berger's hybrid approach.