Microgen - Renewable

How do we measure energy resilience?

In this episode of Renewable, we spoke with Greg Caldwell, Director of Development and Innovation with ATCO. We discussed microgeneration, a broad term for small-scale generation of heat and power by individuals and communities to meet their own needs. Any conversation about microgeneration, given long enough, becomes a conversation about energy resilience — a simple enough idea with big implications. We wanted to dig into this idea a little bit further here: what it means and how we should think about energy resilience in the push for sustainability.

Energy resilience and reliability are overlapping but distinct concepts. Reliability is a combination of the power grid’s ability to meet demand, and its ability to withstand disturbances. When regulatory bodies enforce energy reliability, they’re looking at those two concepts: adequacy and security.

Resilience goes just a bit further in factoring in the kind of big, external events that could do more than just disturb power but knock out a community or individual’s access entirely. When we talk about resilience, we’re talking about whether or not you can expect power to come out of your outlet, regardless of what time of day it is or what’s happening outside. For the average person reading this, the question of energy resilience is probably an abstract one; you can rely, with near absolute certainty, on the fact that if your refrigerator is plugged in it’s running.

For many people around the world, this is not a given. Their communities are not energy resilient. The question is not abstract, nor are the implications. Which brings us back to our first question — how do we measure resilience?

Metrics employed in Canada and the United States tend to focus on the question of time and scope: what’s the cumulative amount of time that electricity was out, and to how many people? We then factor in how long and how much it costs to return power, and the monetary impact of these outages. Lastly, there’s how those outages affect different users. If push comes to shove, an outage to a hospital is worse than an outage to a parking garage, so we have to factor in these kinds of essential services.

We measure these variables so that we can invest in infrastructure that improves them, thus improving resilience. For example, it’s only in knowing that the cumulative outage hours are high, but the recovery cost is low, that we should invest in technology like microgeneration to fill those gaps if we want to improve resilience in that community.

And it’s here that we come back to the question of renewables and microgeneration, and the subject of this episode. For some communities — those facing very certain kinds of energy resilience issues — renewable microgen (creating your own green energy onsite) can be a powerful tool. It can act as a stop gap, keeping power flowing during outages and reducing the time and monetary costs of outages. If the building is energy efficient, it might even be able to address most of the building’s energy needs.

But, as we say in the episode, it’s not a panacea. The grid can’t stay dirty just because people can choose to make clean power, and we can’t let people live without access to a resilient grid, just because they could theoretically choose to do microgen. It’s a tool — one of many — in redesigning and rethinking a system in desperate need of it. It’s a tool in pursuit of both renewability and resilience.

And if you’re interested in learning what that reimagining might look like, through the eyes of a person like Greg who knows more about it than most, you can check out this episode of Renewable.

Renewable is a series about visionaries, creators, community leaders and above all else, Edmontonians, each with a unique vision of a sustainable future in the heart of Canada’s fossil fuel industry.

For more information, visit edmonton.ca/RenewableSeries.