Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2020 | Page 45

How Nuclear Power Can Transform Electric Grid and Critical Infrastructure Resilience
spread of an outage ( USC 2004 , IEEE 2005 ). The voltage and frequency perturbations from the event rippled in real time across most of the Eastern Interconnection and parts of the Quebec Interconnection . Seventy-one nuclear power plants and almost 200 other power plants experienced a disturbance in their interface to the Grid . Some of these disturbances were recognized during the event , while others were only discovered by investigation in the weeks and months after the blackout . This is often the case with complex systems : the failure mechanisms lie dormant within the system until the right set of externalities and internalities coalesce to produce a cascading failure .
The Grid cannot be subjected to meaningful stress tests or taken out of service for testing at any significant spatial scale due to society ’ s continuous dependence on the Grid . Therefore , Grid preparedness for a variety of threats and contingencies relies almost completely on simulation , very limited ( in terms of system architecture and spatial dimensions ) validation testing , and on forensic collection of outage information . This approach does offer very useful information . However , as the statistician George E . P . Box is credited as saying , “ All models are wrong , some are useful .” Experienced engineers know the only way to differentiate between useful models that reveal truth , and misleading models , is to validate them with real-world data . That simply isn ’ t possible at any significant scale with the Grid .
Grid Resilience Defined
The study of Critical Infrastructure and Grid resilience is an embryotic , expanding research field . ( NAS 2017 ) The concept and definition of system resilience — and “ Grid resilience ” in particular — continue to evolve . Adapting terminology originally articulated by the U . S . National Infrastructure Advisory Council in 2009 ( NIAC 2009 ), the U . S . National Academies defined resilience as “ the ability to prepare and plan for , absorb , recover from , and more successfully adapt to adverse events ” ( NAS 2012 ). The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ( FERC ), which regulates only the BPS / BES elements of the Grid , proposed a generalized definition of resilience in 2017 : “ The ability to withstand and reduce the magnitude and / or duration of disruptive events , which includes the capability to anticipate , absorb , adapt to , and / or rapidly recover from ” disruptive events ( FERC 2017 ). Thus , a system is more resilient to the extent that it achieves high situational awareness and anticipation , is prepared by design and operational procedures for disruptive events , and responds to such events by absorbing , adapting , recovering , and restoring operability to pre-disturbance levels in as timely a manner as possible .
The application of FERC ’ s generic definition of Grid resilience is a subject of ongoing debate , the nuances of which exceed the scope of this paper ( see Greene 2017 and Arghandeh 2016 ). However , FERC ’ s generic definition of Grid resilience will be used in the discussion that follows .
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