The Grid: Reliability & Resilience - Letter from the Community Leader

Letter from the Community Leader:

We've seen an explosion of interest in the last year or two on the state of the grid. Reliability and resilience are top of mind in response to interruptions from extreme weather, generation outages, and the increasingly growing demand. Customers expect power to be 100% accessible no matter the time or day, and while utility professionals know there will always be unexpected outages, getting as close to that 100% is always the goal above all else. 

Luckily, this focus on the grid and the need to answer for reliability and resilience is happening in the same timeframe that new tools are becoming available: smart grids, energy storage opportunities, and even robust public investment in modernizing and hardening the grid. 

The goal of the Energy Central Community is to bring together experts and leaders in every facet of the power industry so successful solutions can be shared, collaboration can be utilized to minimize inertia towards new opportunities, and utilities can avoid reinventing the wheel and instead rely upon peers for sharing the best available information. 

This month's entry into our Energy Central Special Issue series focuses on today's grid issues but, even more importantly, the solutions being implemented across the industry toward reliability and resilience. The response to the call for articles in this area has been overwhelming, so I invite you to sit back and learn from the insights from utility executives, top advocates, and leaders of new and innovative solutions in this issue: The Grid: Reliability & Resilience. 

I'll also note that we often receive more submissions than we can include in the newsletter, so be sure to read through all the articles included on our Special Issue Topic Page. 

Finally, the release of the Special Issue isn't the end of the topic but just the beginning. Let's make this Special Issue as interactive as possible: all the authors who submitted articles encourage you to leave comments, questions, and ideas in the comments section. Keeping this dialogue is how the industry can move forward on this vital topic. 

Thanks, and happy reading!

Audra C Drazga
VP of the Power Industry Network