Resilience and reliability for electricity networks

Abstract

Electricity networks in Australia operate in a highly regulated framework. This framework monitors network investment to ensure positive benefits for customers and includes incentivised performance standards that cover reliability. In the current standards, major event days are excluded from the statistics for outages, because they are deemed to be outside the control of the network operators. Outages on major event days are typically the result of severe weather and tend to be prolonged and have a significant negative impact on customers, but current regulations do not cover such events.

The ability of any system to be ready for and recover from a major event is described as resilience, but resilience is not an incentivised activity for electricity networks and the impact of climate change means that major event days are increasing in number, leading to higher costs for customers.

Without a regulatory focus on resilience, a network may meet or exceed reliability standards, while still not being resilient in major events. Investing in reliability does not always deliver resilience, but investing in resilience is demonstrated to deliver significant improvements in both resilience and reliability, resulting in beneficial performance outcomes for customers using cost-effective and efficient network investment approaches.