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19 

 

 

 

Review 

How electricity utility practitioners in the United 

States approach power system resilience  
Shardul Tiwari1, Aritra Chakrabarty2, Chelsea Schelly2*, Mostafa Sahraei-Ardakani3, Gaby Ou4, 

Jianli Chen3 

1University of Toronto, Canada 
2Michigan Technological University, United States 
3University of Utah, United States 
4University of Florida, United States 

A R T I C L E   I N F O 
 

Article history: 
Received 16 December 2024  
Received in revised form 
18 January 2025 
Accepted 30 January 2025 
 
Keywords: 
Energy resilience, Electricity utility,  
Energy services, Resilient energy system, 
United States 
 
*Corresponding author 
Email address:  
cschelly@mtu.edu 
  
 
DOI: 10.55670/fpll.fuen.4.1.3 

A B S T R A C T 
 

This study explores the understanding and practice of resilience among 
electrical utilities in the United States, focusing on how practitioners in the 
utility sector conceptualize and apply resilience in their work. As electricity 
becomes increasingly central to modern life, powering critical infrastructure 
and essential services, the resilience of power systems has gained prominence 
in energy policy and planning. However, there is a lack of standardized 
definitions and approaches to resilience in both academia and practice, 
particularly from an energy service perspective. The research employs a 
qualitative approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews with experts 
(practitioners) from transmission and distribution utilities in the United States 
to examine their definitions, understanding, and applications of resilience. By 
adopting a grounded theory approach, the study aims to identify key themes 
and concepts that practitioners associate with power system resilience. The 
findings outline that there is no clear definition of resilience amongst utility 
practitioners, and resilience and reliability are often used 
interchangeably/synonymously as there are no fixed indicators for resilience 
amongst practitioners. At present, unlike reliability, utilities are not including 
resilience as a term in their long-term resource planning, and neither are they 
reporting resilience-based indicators to any of the government agencies. The 
findings contribute to the ongoing dialogue on energy resilience and offer a 
foundation for developing more comprehensive and context-specific 
approaches to building resilient energy systems that prioritize critical services 
and vulnerable populations. 
 

 
1. Introduction  

Electricity is key to deriving almost every energy service 

required for modern human comforts and is critical to 

building resilient communities [1, 2]. Power systems now 

serve as the lifeline for critical infrastructures such as health, 

education, defense, communications, and overall national 

security [3, 4].  Economic and human development indicators 

often depend on the capability and resiliency of access to 

energy services [5]. The most evident example is in the case 

of any climate-induced disaster or during the war, power 

system protection is considered a priority to derive other 

forms of services. Further, impacts on the electricity system 

have cascading effects on multiple aspects of community 

resiliency [6, 7]. The resiliency of a power system is a proxy 

indicator for understanding the energy services adaptability 

of a community to respond, recover, and rebound from a 

disaster. Historically, energy planning predominantly relied 

on the trilemma of energy security, affordability, and 

sustainability, a relatively new application of energy 

resilience is gaining traction as a key element in energy 

policymaking [8, 9]. This shift to an increased focus on energy 

resilience stems from the study of the resilience of centralized 

oil and gas systems, other energy generation systems, and 

energy services access [10]. The increased influx of renewable 

electricity and utilization of electricity as end-use energy, 

even in the traditionally bereft transportation sector, has led 

to an increased focus on power system resilience [11]. This 

focus on power system resilience has primarily focused on 

system capabilities modeled through various software, with 

limited consideration for human agency, particularly for 

 

 

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February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01 | Pages 19-29 

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S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

20 

 

electrical utilities [10]. The socio-technical nature of power 

systems and socio-technical system resiliency is largely 

under-researched, with a primary focus on developing a 

technically resilient power system. Electrical utilities are the 

primary stakeholders that apply, define, and shape the 

application of energy system resiliency [12].  

Given the evolving restructured competitive electricity 

markets in the USA, which is primarily led by utilities, the 

practitioners' understanding of power system resiliency is of 

critical importance [13]. Currently, utility practitioners’ 

understand resilience as reliability, with a limited 

understanding of resilience in practice within the energy 

industry. Researchers and power system scholars are 

continually debating how utility professionals understand 

and define resiliency at the transmission and distribution 

levels [14, 15]. Scholars have argued that resilient energy 

services is an enigma even when it is a prerequisite to 

understanding the nature of electricity system resilience for 

the community [16]. Given the importance of understanding 

the power sector's resilience and how it impacts energy 

services access, it is imperative to understand how 

practitioners working in the utility sector understand energy 

resilience. 

The energy resilience of a power system and its 

capabilities are typically understood and captured using 

reliability indicators. Power system scholars utilize metrics 

such as System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) 

and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) to 

understand the average power interruption to consumers 

and outages in the system [17]. However, these indicators do 

not tell us which customers are affected in what ways, 

particularly for the people who are most vulnerable in a 

particular power system. The current lack of a standard 

definition for resiliency, particularly energy system/service 

resiliency, in academia and practice has created a challenge to 

comprehensively develop and build models that look at 

community resiliency through an energy service approach. 

Energy systems resilience must prioritize access to energy 

services for those who are vulnerable in the case of energy 

services disruption [18].  

This paper aims to explore the understanding and 

practice of resilience among electrical utilities in the US. As 

there is currently limited research on how utility 

practitioners utilize resilience in their work, this paper serves 

as an initial foray into examining the meaning and utilization 

of resilience in transmission and distribution utilities. The 

paper uses a qualitative semi-structured interview approach 

to interview experts from utilities at the transmission and 

distribution level to understand and explore the 

practitioners' current definition of resiliency.  

We explore the current themes discussed by the 

practitioners to apply the concept of resilience coherently. 

Based on this grounded theory approach, we situate energy 

resilience into community resiliency through an energy 

service approach, which is under-represented in the study of 

energy resilience yet is key in developing a resilient power 

system. 

 

 

2. Background: electric utility & resilience in the United 

States  

2.1 Resilience of the current utility sector in the United 

States  

The electric utility in the US has its roots in a 

decentralized system, with initial regulations starting at 

municipal, thereafter state, and only later at the federal level 

[19]. The role of electricity has expanded since the enactment 

of the Rural Electrification Act in 1935, which led to the US-

wide electrification of rural US households through electric 

cooperatives with the foremost goal of providing electricity 

services to rural farms [20, 21]. However, the expansion of 

utilities through the late 1990s till today involves a 

centralized system with vertical integration of a sector that 

has been considered a natural monopoly of the Public Utility 

Commission (PUC) or Public Service Commission (PSC) 

operating at the state level [22]. Vertical integration involves 

a single company's ownership of three main parts of the 

power system: generation, transmission, and distribution 

[23]. This vertically integrated sector required regulation, as 

they were deemed natural monopolies.  The major focus of 

scholarship has been on the economic argument for 

regulating monopolies to provide people with electricity at a 

reasonable price. However, given the nature of the power 

system, where electricity cannot easily be stored and 

maintaining grid frequency is of utmost importance in the 

power system, system reliability was also a major concern for 

the regulators [20]. Following the deregulation of the electric 

power industry, wholesale power markets were formed in 

parts of the US, with separate entities owning generation, 

transmission, and distribution. Administration of the 

wholesale markets in deregulated regions is the 

responsibility of Independent System Operators 

(ISOs)/Regional Transmission System Operators (RTOs). 

ISOs/RTOs are also responsible for maintaining grid 

reliability and resiliency [19, 24]. Both regions with vertically 

integrated utilities and restructured markets in North 

America must adhere to North American Electric Reliability 

Corporation (NERC) standards to ensure the reliability and 

security of the bulk power system (Figure 1). Some of these 

standards encompass various aspects of system operation, 

including critical infrastructure protection (CIP), which 

safeguards physical and cyber assets. Utilities must follow 

transmission operations (TOP) standards, ensuring real-time 

system monitoring and coordination and transmission 

planning (TPL), which involves assessing future system needs 

and reliability. Utilities have to maintain the NERC standards, 

such as the development of emergency plans (EOP) for system 

disturbances, modeling, data, and analysis (MOD) to support 

accurate system simulations, and resource and demand 

balancing (BAL) to maintain system stability.  

The electrical utility sector today is complex, involving 

multiple layers of actors, institutions, and interests. The US 

electricity segment contains over 24,645 electricity 

generation power plants with over 11,000 utility-scale plants 

with a nameplate capacity of over 1 MW. With the growing 

utilization of electricity as a means of service, the utilities' 

transmission and distribution network capacity is expected to 

grow at a brisk pace, particularly after the implementation of 

the Inflation Regulation Act (IRA) aimed at infrastructure 

improvement. The increase in central dependency on the 



S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

21 

 

power grid to provide end-use energy makes electrical 

utilities' understanding and application of resilience even 

more critical in the restructured electricity market. 

Restoration and recovery of services are of prime importance. 

Electricity is seen as a means for people to incur services, and 

the need for services can range across multiple dimensions of 

social vulnerability; hence, it is essential to understand the 

meaning and application of resilience amongst professionals 

in the transitioning electrical utility sector.  

 
Figure 1. Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs)/Independent 

System Operators (ISOs) 

 

2.2 Electricity utility services & resiliency   

Electricity is a core commodity required to derive a 

multitude of services for human needs and comforts. Any 

attack on the supply or distribution of electricity can disrupt 

those multitude of human services. The National Academy of 

Sciences (NAS) has outlined that power systems are 

increasingly vulnerable to physical and nonphysical attacks, 

such as cyber-attacks and extreme weather [24]. The current 

US electric system is increasingly vulnerable to climate-

induced disasters, which impacts community resilience as 

well since it is tied to electricity system resilience [18]. 

However, unlike other commodities, utilities cannot 

independently improve resiliency because they are linked to 

each other through distribution, and supply purchase and sale 

and work within a market response model since each is 

competing to gain consumers and remain profitable [24]. 

Hence, the overall goal of providing resilient energy services 

and maintaining a resilient grid (both at transmission and 

distribution levels) sits at a crossroads of myriad economic, 

climate, and social priorities. Power outages translate into 

direct service disruptions, which can vary across a spectrum 

from a minor inconvenience to a fight between life and death 

for some community members. For instance, in a recent 

power outage in Michigan, 467,000 people were left without 

power in freezing cold weather [25]. The same was observed 

during the Texas power crisis, where 4.5 million people were 

left without power [18], and those with access to electricity 

paid very high electricity bills because of the market 

principles of increased prices with constrained electricity 

supply and high demand [26, 27]. The impact of power 

outages is compounded by the fact that utilities are not 

required by federal law to report power outages. There are no 

rules to report the resiliency of a power system till a recent 

ruling by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) 

that requires interstate electric transmission providers to file 

one-time informational reports assessing the susceptibility of 

their systems to extreme weather events to the NERC. 

However, this rule is only applicable to power outages caused 

by extreme weather events. The scope of this rule is limited to 

current and planned policies of transmission providers when 

exposed to extreme weather events. Apart from this rule, 

power utilities are mandated to report reliability data to 

NERC. The NERC then assigns ‘cause codes’ from the reported 

data that identify the cause of the power outage event. These 

cause codes cover momentary (less than a minute) and 

sustained (more than a minute) outages. The cause codes are 

the basis of our current understanding of the energy 

resilience of a power system.  

The NERC data reporting requirement notwithstanding, 

scholars have increasingly attempted to develop metrics to 

gauge power outages and report power system resilience 

[28]. Technical standards of reliability, such as the System 

Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI)/System 

Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI), measure the 

reliability of electricity service. SAIFI and SAIDI are 

international standards created by the Institute of Electrical 

Electronics Engineers (IEEE). These indicators are used by 

transmission and distribution companies across the world to 

measure, report, and track the reliability of power systems. 

Each of the participating utility managers in this study 

submitted data to EIA through Form 861, which is the annual 

electric power industry report and contains reliability 

indicators such as SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI. Form EIA 861 

collects annual information on the status of electric power 

industry participants involved in the generation, 

transmission, and distribution of electric energy. Power 

outage reporting requirements are in the form of standards 

set by NERC (Event Reporting Standard EOP-004-4) [29], 

according to which utilities are to report events that cause 

outages exceeding a certain threshold of either a loss of a load 

of more than 300 MegaWatts (MW), and/or impacts over 

50,000 customers. However, these metrics are associated 

with restoring and/or improving the physical infrastructure 

and exclude the impact on community resilience. There is a 

lack of academic agreement on defining or measuring 

resilience in the context of power systems. Often, it is used 

synonymously with reliability, which is extensively used in 

power system studies and has agreed-upon indicators and 

metrics. Reliability has been defined by the Department of 

Energy as “the ability of the system or its components to 

withstand instability, uncontrolled events, cascading failures, 

or unanticipated loss of system components”. On the other 

hand, resilience encompasses human factors as well, as its 

scope includes the differential and compounding impact of 

power outages on communities [30, 31]. To put it simply, a 

power system can be reliable but not resilient because of 

limited consideration of the impact of outages on different 

groups of people over time-based on a range of vulnerabilities 

caused by energy service disruption. Reliability, when used as 

a synonym with resilience, only captures limited information 

of who is getting impacted by the power system design 

failures and the ways in which utilities are trying to minimize 



S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

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this failure. Through this study, we are trying to bridge this 

gap by understanding how utility managers understand and 

define resilience and how they foresee the future of 

developing a resilient power system that can cater to the 

energy service needs of all people. 

3. Research methodology  

This study is an initial foray into understanding energy 

resilience through conversations with professionals about the 

use and definition of the energy resilience term in their 

practical work. Semi-structured interviews are considered an 

appropriate method for inductive research when the intent is 

to understand the meanings and how stakeholders use a 

particular concept, which in our case is energy resilience in 

the context of energy and disaster policymaking [32-34] have 

stated that semi-structured interviews are one of the best 

forms of data collection during the exploratory phase of a 

study. This qualitative research tool suits our study as our 

goal is to answer ‘how utility managers think, define, and take 

action on energy resilience’. We do not intend to test any 

hypothesis about the utility functions. We use the data 

collected from the interviews to identify new insights and 

propose further research. This method is criticized for being 

vulnerable to bias, particularly social desirability bias, and not 

providing a means to generalize the research result [35]; 

however, our goal is to provide new conceptual insights that 

can be explored further in future empirical work. Given the 

exploratory nature of our study with no intention to prove a 

particular hypothesis, we make no claim to generalize the 

research results. Hence, this is an appropriate method and 

form of analysis. We structured the interview into two 

modules: Prevention of Transmission & Distribution (T&D) 

losses and Restoration/Recovery.  

3.1 Data collection 

Utility experts were selected for the interviews to 

explore understanding and use of resilience in power systems 

operations in the US. The potential respondents were selected 

through an iterative process of snowball sampling [35]. The 

interviews were conducted between August 2022 and 

February 2023. We interviewed utility providers with 

territories in roughly tens of states in the contiguous US and 

one unincorporated territory of the US.  Twelve interviews 

were conducted with eighteen participants. Out of the twelve 

interviews, one interview was telephonic; two were in-person 

interviews; one company submitted written responses to the 

interview questions, and the other eight were conducted 

online. The choice of the means to conduct the interview (in-

person, over the phone, online) was based on the preference 

of the interviewee. Out of the eighteen respondents, nine were 

one-to-one interviews, and the rest were group interviews - 

one with a team of four people, one with a team of three 

people, and another with a team of two people. In the United 

States, electric utilities operate in a highly competitive market 

and hence are apprehensive of sharing information that might 

hurt their profitability due to asymmetric information. The 

initial respondents were recruited through available 

professional referrals and by contact through information 

available on utility websites. Over forty emails for interview 

recruitment were sent to different utilities, including utilities 

working at the transmission and distribution system levels. 

The unit of study is electrical utility; hence, utility managers 

were interviewed depending on the scale of the utility. For 

small utilities, we had a single participant, while in large 

transmission system operators, once we had a team of four 

people, and one was a team of three people. 

3.2 Data analysis  

Stake [36] and later Sovacool et al. [37] state that 

qualitative data analysis involves segregating data into 

themes and understanding those themes and their relation to 

each other. Miles and Huberman [38] summarized qualitative 

data analysis as a means to dissect meaning from the text 

while keeping the relations between the parts intact. Creswell 

[35] provides the foundation steps of qualitative data 

analysis, regardless of the type of methodology employed. We 

utilized Nvivo to do manual coding following the Creswell 

[35] guidelines using the following interactive steps for data 

analysis.   

• Anonymizing and cleaning transcripts as raw data for 

analysis; 

• Echo reading to get a general sense of the data; 

• Coding data based on themes; 

• Contextualizing and finding linkages between the themes; 

• Interpretation of data. 

4. Findings 

The analysis of the text data from the interviews reveals 

that utilities have a well-defined scope and activities 

regarding the reliability of the power system, metrics to 

measure the reliability, and a systemized process of reporting 

power outages to federal authorities. However, the 

understanding of resilience goes beyond the scope of 

reliability, tracking, and reporting power outages. Resilience 

also encompasses community resilience and disaster 

resilience in the aftermath of extreme weather events. Five 

themes emerged based on the data - the cause of outages in 

power systems, the process of system maintenance, 

understanding of resilience, the cooperation among utilities, 

and regulations on resilience. The most important finding was 

the gap in understanding resilience as something that goes 

beyond grid reliability (Table 1).  

4.1 Causes of outage  

All interviewees identified weather-related outages as 

the most common in power systems. The participants 

classified them as significant disturbances, including big 

storms hitting the power system or smaller ones, such as 

when a bird accidentally blows out a transformer or local 

winds leading to a tree falling and damaging a particular 

distribution system line. The utilities working in the 

distribution system highlighted more frequent impacts on 

their grid and services when compared with transmission 

utilities. Utilities with relatively new infrastructure have the 

advantage of having a higher tolerance to weather-related 

events due to new equipment and no legacy challenges. 

Falling trees or vegetation are the most common reasons 

outlined for electricity outages. One utility outlined that "over 

70% plus of all of our outages are either tree or weather-

related, and they're intertwined because trees fall down a lot 

more during bad weather." The type of weather-related 

outage varies depending on the utility territory, with the most 

common ones identified as a hurricane, extreme wind events, 

earthquakes, floods, and ice storms. It is important to note 



S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

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that these events were not classified as mutually exclusive 

and can happen simultaneously. In general, utilities use 

approximately 30 different cause codes to categorize the 

reason for an outage. However, these cause codes are not 

uniform and can vary in terms of the nomenclature used 

across utilities, as the regulatory authorities do not mandate 

these codes at the federal or state level.  

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the case of minor outages, utilities do not maintain a clear 

demarcation of understanding if a tree-related outage is 

caused by weather or by humans. For instance, as explained 

by one respondent, "An amateur lumberjack dropped a tree 

into the easement of their property and happened to dent a 

nearby transmission line." Most participants agreed that 

when a significant event impacts the system, it is generally an 

extreme weather-related outage. Some third-party 

interference, such as vehicle accidents, were relatively 

common; however, these occur at a relatively small scale. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 1. Summary of findings 

Issues Summary of theme Scale of the issue Relevance to resilience 

Causes of Outage Extreme weather events, 

followed by small local 
incidents, and lastly human-
caused events 

Distribution systems are more 

severely impacted compared to 
transmission systems. Utilities 

with new infrastructure can 

withstand impacts better than 
older utilities with legacy issues. 

While outages and restoration is part of 

system resilience, restoration practices are 
not uniform across utilities and resilience 

to extreme weather events is not part of 

planning at either transmission or 
distribution scale. 

System Maintenance Most utilities conduct full 

system maintenance every 10 - 

12 years, but there is no 
standard regulation nor any 

oversight to govern system 
maintenance.  

Age of the system and its 

geographical spread determine the 

cost and frequency of 
maintenance. 

Distribution utilities depend on 
human inspection while 

transmission utilities have 
automated the process. 

The lack of standard regulations reflects 

how utilities conduct maintenance, which 

is based on an informal understanding of 
best practices. A resilience-based 

regulation could involve not only 

maintenance but also impacts on 
communities. 

Resilience vs 
Reliability 

Utility managers understand 
resilience from a reliability 

perspective. While there are 

standard metrics to measure 
reliability of a system, 

resilience is a new concept that 
has not been defined yet.  

Reliability is measured through 

SAIDI and SAIFI indicators that 

a utility submits to the EIA. The 

data is available through NERC 

in regions throughout the entire 

US. Resilience is not measured or 

reported by the utilities either at 

the transmission or distribution 

level.  

Resilience measurement is absent. There 
is no metric to understand the scale of 

impact an outage has on consumers. The 

absence of indicators is a result of no 
agreement amongst utilities regarding the 
scope of resilience beyond reliability. 

Cooperation among 
Utilities 

Cooperation is based on 
informal agreement among 

neighboring distribution utilities 

to provide man hours prior to 
and post-disaster events.  

Municipal utilities depend on 
Investor Owned Utilities (IOU) 

for restart of substation after 

outage events. There are 
organizational barriers that 

prevent formal cooperation 

agreements among IOUs and 
municipal utilities regarding the 

scope of maintenance at 

distribution level. 

Cooperation is a factor of the extent of the 
damage, the geographical coverage of 

each utility, and dependence on IOU. 

However, with lack of formal agreements 
and/or rules, restoration (reliability), and 

resilience is open to interpretation across 
utilities. 

Regulations  There are reliability standards at 

the transmission and 

distribution levels. However, 

there are no strict guidelines for 

resilience, particularly in the 

aftermath of an outage. 

The absence of standardized rules 
and regulations is felt the most at 

the transmission and distribution 

scale. This is a top-down issue 
where the absence of 

standardization from the federal 

level flows down in the form of 
an informal understanding of 

what is considered essential 

services by utilities 
independently. 

This is the most critical issue which 
influences how the transmission and 

distribution companies invest on 

resilience. Technical parameters aside, 
resilience is also the impact of power 

outage on utility services (electricity, 

water, gas, water, wastewater, and steam) 
that define community lives [39].  

 



S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

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4.2 System maintenance 

System age and the utility's size in terms of its 

geographical spread significantly impact how it is maintained. 

A smaller, newly established utility has a more robust system 

than an old one with significant stranded assets, particularly 

when another firm acquires the old system following the 

restructuring of the electricity sector of the US in various 

states. One participant outlined “the legacy costs create a 

significant challenge to maintaining system reliability and 

resiliency.” This statement highlights the synonymous use of 

reliability and resilience in practice. At the distribution 

system, a lot of maintenance and restoration work still relies 

on human inspection, and technology use is largely restricted 

to outage management systems integrated with Supervisory 

Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Using SCADA 

depends on the utility budget and territorial spread, which is 

common for transmission utilities and not so common 

amongst small distribution utilities. Some utilities are 

bringing in new systems, particularly for vegetation 

management, to enhance the system's resilience from minor 

storms and weather events. However, significant penetration 

of such maintenance systems is still needed. Software for 

monitoring and inspection is more common at the 

transmission level, which can be attributed to the availability 

of more resources with the transmission companies. The 

average maintenance cycle for distribution companies is 12-

14 years, which means one-twelfth to one-fourteenth of the 

system is replaced yearly in the utility geographical territory. 

Different utilities have varying standards for the maintenance 

of their system, even though most of them are based on the 

best practices from the industry. Each utility is free to 

maintain its system the way it deems fit. Hence, one utility can 

have a pole cycle of 12 years and others of 10 years; the same 

is true for other parts of the system. As one utility 

representative outlined, "We are in the service industry, and 

we have to satisfy our customers, and we choose to do it in a 

way which we deem best for consumers." Hence, there is no 

regulatory standard for the operation of utility services. The 

findings highlight the need for the implementation of 

regulations on the use of advanced technologies and systems 

at the distribution level for effective maintenance and 

restoration work. While SCADA systems are commonly used 

in transmission utilities, their implementation in distribution 

utilities is often limited due to budget constraints and the 

geographical spread of the distribution network. The 

maintenance cycle for distribution companies, which 

typically ranges from 10 to 14 years, further emphasizes the 

need for efficient monitoring and inspection systems to 

ensure the reliability and resilience of the distribution 

system. The type of technology notwithstanding, the findings 

point to the lack of and the need for policies at the federal level 

on use of technologies that can significantly improve the 

maintenance and restoration processes, enhance system 

resilience, and enable more efficient asset management. 

4.3 Resilience vs reliability  

Across interviews, there was consensus that resiliency is 

a new buzzword in the electrical utility industry. However, 

there is yet to be a clear and standard definition and 

description of the term. Resiliency was often described as 

synonymous with reliability; however, during the interview, 

three interviewees outlined that they are used synonymously 

but are different. There was also an expressed need to define 

resiliency and specify how the term should be used in the 

utility sector. One participant mentioned, “there are many 

metrics for reliability that have long existed and are well 

understood; there are no known metrics for resilience today.” 

Interviewees substantiated the claim that reliability is often 

associated with the SAIDI and SAIFI indicators. Furthermore, 

the integrated resource planners within the utility outlined 

that they do not use resiliency as a term for future energy 

systems planning and that they need quantifiable metrics for 

resiliency before it can be incorporated into planning and 

practice.  

Another participant defined resilience as "reliability 

informs the resiliency of a power system," suggesting that 

reliability is a prerequisite for resilience rather than the two 

being synonymous. Participants further clarified that 

reliability refers to the ability to keep the majority of the lights 

on most of the time, while resilience is the capacity to respond 

to and recover from high-impact events. One interviewee 

mentioned that the definition of resilience should also 

account for the resilience of the relationship between the 

utility and its consumers and how waning trust between 

customers and the utility can be restored. The common theme 

regarding power system resilience is the need to develop 

temporal indicators that can measure the system's bearing 

capacity for different levels of impact, its level of adaptability, 

and the amount of transformation required for the system to 

remain reliable. 

Findings suggest the importance of distinguishing 

reliability and resilience in the context of power systems. 

Critical to this distinction is the temporal aspect of resilience, 

wherein indicators for pre-, during, and post-event impacts 

are needed to understand the impact on communities. 

Enhancing community resilience is tied to the temporal 

aspect - trust and communication between utilities and 

consumers before, during, and after extreme events. Another 

aspect of community resilience is understanding how energy 

services are differentiated among customers; people living in 

older housing are more vulnerable to disruptions to heating 

and cooling services, as are residents with very young or very 

old household members. Medically vulnerable consumers 

who need electric power to maintain access to necessary 

medical equipment face different vulnerabilities than those 

who are healthy. Based on the interviews, this aspect of 

community resilience, recognition of energy services access, 

and its link to social vulnerabilities is currently missing from 

considerations of reliability and resilience in the power 

sector.  

4.4 Cooperation among utilities 

Interviewees outlined that utilities have signed and, 

more commonly, unsigned agreed upon understandings for 

helping neighboring electrical utilities, particularly in the 

distribution system. In case of an anticipated disaster, helping 

other utilities by sending the crew at standard labor rates is 

practiced. In case of more significant disasters in terms of 

geographical scale and scope, the crew also arrives from 

further away utilities, and that time lag to accessing the 

necessary labor for restoration work to begin cannot 



S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

25 

 

currently be classified under the resiliency of the system as it 

is not based on any of the reliability indicators within the 

power sector. During high-impact events, cooperation among 

utilities can also be hindered by organizational barriers and 

arrangements. 

Interviewees mentioned that cooperation is a key 

element of recovery because, in case of an event requiring 

additional workforce and equipment for pre-staging or post-

event work, utilities cooperate in providing the services.  One 

respondent stated, "In my mind, the biggest thing we need to 

do is better coordinate for preparing for mutual aid 

activities,” which, in most cases, is based on informal 

understandings as identified in this statement, "It's just an 

understanding basis, say hey, you know, come on over and 

help us out; we'll send you a bill and help you during your 

situation."  

The structure and geography of a particular utility 

system can significantly influence its response to outages. As 

explained by several participants, when an outage occurs in a 

small municipal utility proximate to the service territory of an 

investor-owned utility (IOU), or vice versa (although the 

former scenario is more common), even after the municipal 

utility restores its distribution system, they may still have to 

wait for the IOU to restore or reboot the substation, leading to 

a delay in power restoration. The municipal utility typically 

pays kneeling charges to the IOU for maintaining the 

substation. This situation arises when an IOU has a significant 

territory and does not, or to some extent, cannot maintain a 

contractual relationship authorizing the municipal utility to 

work on the substation. While the municipal utility can repair 

distribution lines, the substation may fall under the IOU's 

jurisdiction, and interviews discussed this exact situation as 

one highlighting the need for cooperation between utilities. 

4.5 Regulations for resilience  

One crucial aspect of the restoration process is the 

prioritization of essential services and critical infrastructure. 

These terms refer to facilities and services that are vital for 

the functioning of a community, such as hospitals, emergency 

services, water treatment plants, and communication 

networks. Ensuring the continuous operation or prompt 

restoration of these services is crucial for public safety and 

minimizing the impact of outages. While utilities follow 

reliability standards at the transmission and distribution 

levels, there are no strict guidelines dictating restoration 

processes. Instead, utilities rely on their own best practices, 

which leads to inconsistencies in priorities and procedures. 

There are 16 Critical Infrastructure (CI) sectors 

according to the National Infrastructure Protection Plan 

(NIPP) [40]. Within those CIs are “lifeline functions,” which 

refers to a sector that provides indispensable services that 

enable the continuous operation of critical business and 

government functions and that would risk human health and 

safety or national and economic security if compromised or 

not promptly restored. These lifeline functions include 

communications, energy, transportation, and water. 

However, the participants highlighted that the definition of 

what constitutes an essential service or critical infrastructure 

is not uniformly defined by external agencies; instead, each 

utility determines its own criteria, particularly at the 

distribution level. This lack of standardization can lead to 

discrepancies across different utility service areas, where 

certain facilities, such as nursing homes or schools, may be 

prioritized in one area but not in another. 

5. Discussion 

The future of energy resilience from a utility perspective 

is increasingly intertwined with reliability concerns, 

particularly in light of emerging technologies, changing 

energy consumption patterns and a changing global climate. 

Utilities are grappling with the challenge of adapting their 

infrastructure to accommodate the growth of electric vehicles 

(EVs) and the increasing electrification of various services. As 

one participant noted, "One of the things we're looking at is 

upgrading our distribution system to meet the demand for 

electric vehicles and other things; we are going to have to 

have something more robust if everybody is plugging in a 

car." This sentiment reflects a broader concern among 

utilities, especially municipal entities, as they strive to 

enhance system capacity and robustness to meet evolving 

electricity demands. 

The increasing reliance on electricity for essential 

services such as heating, cooling, lighting, communication, 

and food storage amplifies the potential impact of even minor 

outages. As stated earlier, the NIPP (2013) has defined 16 

Critical Infrastructure (CI) sectors, and within those CIs, it has 

defined “lifeline functions,” which refers to a sector that 

provides indispensable services that enable the continuous 

operation of critical business and government functions, and 

that would risk human health and safety or national and 

economic security if compromised or not promptly restored. 

To address the challenge of ensuring lifeline functions, 

utilities are considering various technical solutions to 

enhance both reliability and resilience. These include 

investments in storm hardening measures, such as 

reinforcing poles and wires and transitioning from overhead 

to underground distribution lines. Additionally, utilities are 

exploring the implementation of Distribution Automation and 

remote Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) 

systems to improve system monitoring and control 

capabilities. However, different utilities prioritize different 

aspects of resilience, and there is no specification on what 

constitutes essential services in a utility territory. The 

implementation of these identified resilience-enhancing 

measures presents a significant economic challenge. The 

costs associated with modernizing transmission and 

distribution systems are substantial and would likely be 

passed on to customers. This economic burden creates a 

tension between the need for infrastructure upgrades and the 

imperative to maintain affordable electricity rates. Utilities 

face the complex task of justifying these investments to both 

regulators and customers, often in unfavorable regulatory 

and public opinion environments. 

The findings suggest the need for further research on 

defining the scope and measurement of resilience at the 

transmission and distribution levels. This research can be 

expanded upon by including the perspectives of the impacted 

communities and resilience impacts after power outage 

events. The lack of consideration of the impact of power 

outages on essential services and challenges faced by 

vulnerable communities during outages requires broadening 

of our understanding of resilience and establishing standard 



S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

26 

 

metrics for measuring resilience impacts of outages. 

Participants are aware that climate-induced disasters will 

increase in the future, leading to a higher probability of 

system outages. This finding confirms current research on 

how increasing climate disaster events would risk power 

system reliability [41, 42]. Extreme weather events are now a 

significant cause of power system failure beyond the 

contingency of N-1-1 for the events that are financially 

unfeasible to plan for as they are once-in-a-lifetime events. 

Hence, the participants agreed that they need indicators and 

a framework for applying resilience in the utility sector. 

Currently, resilience is being used synonymously with 

reliability without any specific framework on how and on 

whom the benefits and the costs associated with adapting to 

resilience are to be distributed. The lack of focus on energy 

service vulnerabilities also leads to a lack of not 

understanding of how consumers energy service needs are 

differentially impacted. As power systems are only a means to 

serve people's energy needs, there is a need to look at people's 

energy service needs while considering the power system's 

resilience [43]. The increasing reliance on electricity for 

essential services such as heating, cooling, lighting, 

communication, and food storage amplifies the potential 

impact of even minor outages. This heightened vulnerability 

underscores the need for improved system resilience [42]. 

The absence of standardization on what constitutes critical or 

essential services across utilities is another cause of concern. 

Communities' specific needs and vulnerabilities can vary 

based on their geographic location, socioeconomic 

characteristics, and existing infrastructure [44]. Although the 

importance of different categories of services at times might 

not vary across groups, the communities' specific needs and 

vulnerabilities still vary since these needs could depend on 

housing characteristics (e.g., house insulation level), specific 

comfort requirements across individuals, and health needs of 

occupants [45].  Research also indicates that utilities can 

prioritize different services based on their customer base, 

revenue considerations, and organizational priorities [46]. 

This understanding reflects a broader concern among 

utilities, especially municipal entities, as they strive to 

enhance system capacity and robustness to meet evolving 

electricity demands [47]. A key finding that has been 

prominent in the field of disaster resilience [48], is the 

importance of stakeholder cooperation. As highlighted by 

most interviewees, utilities support each other in case of 

emergencies and system failure. However, this is mainly done 

through mutual understanding and rarely with written 

agreements. Utilities in most of the US have eminent domain 

and now they are trying to compete with each other for 

customers [49]. Therefore, in cases of competing interests 

and nested jurisdictions, cooperation during system failures 

requires a more nuanced understanding. 

Lack of agreement among transmission and distribution 

utilities in the US regarding resilience indicators is further 

evidenced by other studies.  Bie et al. [50] note that different 

utilities prioritize different aspects of resilience based on 

their region-specific vulnerabilities and experiences with past 

disruptions. With electricity being a central element in 

providing services for every aspect of human life, it is 

important to articulate how resilience is defined for people 

and the criteria for restoration and recovery of energy 

services. This disparity in focus can lead to inconsistent 

approaches to measuring and improving resilience across the 

power sector. There is a need to develop a common 

understanding of the meaning of resilience in the utility 

sector and develop the means of measuring it and including 

resilience in integrated resource planning. The practitioners 

interviewed in the electrical utility sector did not identify a 

single definition of energy resilience. As often done in 

engineering studies, participants articulated energy 

resiliency as synonymous with reliability. There is a clear 

agreement that reliability indicators are clearly defined and 

measurable through data submitted to EIA and other 

reporting requirements of utilities regarding power outages 

to NERC.  However, the scope and definition of resilience are 

vaguely understood and misplaced with reliability in terms of 

standard metrics. Resilience is temporal in nature and 

includes aspects of recovering after a disaster. This element is 

not covered in any reliability indicator on how long the 

distribution system should deter the impact of an event and 

how quickly it has to recover from the impact and be prepared 

for the subsequent failure. Furthermore, differential impacts 

on different segments of the population are also a key factor 

missing from practitioners’ understanding of resilience. 

Umunnakwe et al. [51] have proposed a categorization 

scheme for quantitative power system resilience metrics. The 

categorization scheme in the study by Umunnakwe et al. [51] 

reflects the multifaceted nature of resilience, encompassing 

aspects such as robustness, resourcefulness, rapid recovery, 

and adaptability. However, the development of universally 

accepted quantitative indicators remains challenging due to 

lack of agreement among utilities on what constitutes 

resilience.  

6. Conclusion 

Through the study, we explored how electrical utilities 

think of, and practice resilience in the context of power 

systems, which are increasingly affected by the increasing 

impacts of climate change. Our analysis of the interviews 

provides valuable insights into how electrical utilities 

conceptualize and implement resilience in the face of 

increasing climate change impacts. This case study on 

resilience is novel because academic literature has not looked 

into understanding resilience from an energy service 

perspective and the ways in which practitioners in the 

electrical utility sector understand and use the term. It 

highlights the need for a more contextualized understanding 

of resilience that goes beyond grid stability, emphasizing the 

importance of clearly defined critical services and vulnerable 

populations. However, this study does not represent the 

understanding of the entire utility sector in the US. Hence, no 

attempt is made to generalize the results of this study using a 

small sample of interviews conducted. The scope of the study 

was limited as the approach was to dig deep into 

understanding the perspective of a wide range of utilities 

from different geographical regions in the US.  The findings 

are still relevant given the methodology of studying resilience 

and understanding a particular sector’s perspectives. As 

electricity becomes increasingly central to all aspects of 

human life and the energy landscape evolves with 

electrification and retail choice, a nuanced approach to power 

system resilience that considers both technical and social 



S. Tiwari et al. /Future Energy                                                                                                 February 2025| Volume 04 | Issue 01| Pages 19-29 

27 

 

dimensions is crucial for future planning and policy 

development. 

Ethical issue 
The authors are aware of and comply with best practices in 
publication ethics, specifically concerning authorship 
(avoidance of guest authorship), dual submission, 
manipulation of figures, competing interests, and compliance 
with policies on research ethics. The authors adhere to 
publication requirements that the submitted work is original 
and has not been published elsewhere in any language. 

Data availability statement 
The manuscript contains all the data. However, more data will 

be available upon request from the corresponding author. 

Conflict of interest 

The authors declare no potential conflict of interest. 

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