 of the digital grid webinar series and we'll introduce our great panel for today. But once again, this is the sixth of our digital grid summer webinar series that follows the digital grid virtual workshop that we held in June. Just a bit of housekeeping. We have every one of you as attendees on mute. There are two ways that you can ask questions. The one we recommend is to go to the bottom of your screen and you'll see a cloud icon for chat. That's our chat feature. And that's a great way to provide questions, to interact with the speakers and moderators and to provide questions in that way. There's also an option, if you look at the, to ask a question in the Q and A. And either way is fine and we will, as moderators, ask those questions to our speakers as we go through. We are recording this presentation and your participation is your consent to be a part of this recording. And the recordings and the presentations will be available at both the Stanford and EPRI websites. And Liang will talk a bit about that. Again, we're delighted as EPRI to be co-hosts with Stanford. We both are approaching this from very similar and complementary perspectives. EPRI is an independent novel profit research organization focused on every aspect of utility operations. And our focus is on advancing the safety, reliability, affordability and environmental responsibility associated with the grid through collaborative research. In much the same way, Stanford's Bits and Watts Initiative is really focused on advancing the grid for the next century through business innovation, policies and technologies on both the customer and grid edge to enhance the customer utility relationship. So we're really very happy to have had the success of this series through the summer. So our objectives, it's really to convene experts from diverse backgrounds and very disciplines to exchange views on what a shared integrated digital grid represents. And you'll see to the right, there are a number of elements that are or can be elements of this grid. And where we look at, our real focus is to look at some of the key gaps to attaining this vision. And one of the primary kind of touchstones for what a shared integrated digital grid represent would be the ability to integrate customer resources seamlessly as agents to help with grid flexibility. And one of the key gaps is enabling data platforms and other related systems to get us to that end state. So the experts that we've had from multiple backgrounds and with multiple themes each week are really helping us to understand from the utility point of view what the requirements are, what the realities are on the ground, what are some of the things that have been learned from pilots and demonstrations and even rollouts in the real world. And then from the academic and research point of view and from the technology provider point of view to understand what some of the technological and other gaps are to achieving some of these enabling technologies towards this end. Ultimately what we are endeavoring to do, and this is for both sort of Epri and Stanford is to inform a research roadmap and to develop a collaborative research initiative informed by the perspectives that have been shared by the cumulative effect of our digital workshop and seminars. And again, there are many ways to encapsulate what a shared integrated digital grid represents, but as I said, one of the key themes that we are using throughout our discussion is the integration of customer resources as options to help optimize grid flexibility. So that's a through today's theme of customer resiliency and resiliency with customer DERs. That's a very key aspect and we're looking forward to this discussion. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to my colleague Liang Ming from Stanford to tell us a bit more about what we've done so far and what we're gonna do today. So Liang over to you. Thank you, Omar. And again, we are very happy and glad and honored to co-host this webinar series with Epri. And just a little bit of recap what has been discussed and what kind of webinars we have been hosting in the last months or two. And in June, we have the digital grid virtual workshop. We brought together several US utility, European utility together plus IT companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel and VMware to discuss the current practice as utility at IT company, what kind of data platform they have been using or they are thinking to bring the customer into the grid. They're starting from last month in July and we had four webinars with the support from different group of players in this field including the startup company, universities and federal and state funding agencies and also some of the previous conversation we had. And the starting from this month and what we're going to have is four webinars and each of them will focus on one perspective of the value that customer DR can bring to the grid. So if you're interested in the previous seven webinars you can find the recording from both Epri website and also Stanford based on what event website. So this is the four panels we are planning or we are lined up in this month. And actually we planned today's webinar about several weeks ago and we cannot predict the future. So we didn't predict that is there going to have a hurricane happening in this week and all of us are living a president time with COVID-19, with lockdown, people stay at home and the utility still has the responsibility to keep life up and they did a great job. And but I looked at the outage report this morning we still have about 2.5 million customers in the Northeast area without power. And so it's very important for us to discuss that how the customer DR can bring the value to help enhance the grid resilience. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce the three outstanding panelists for today's conversation. And what we are going to do is we will start with one utility from certain company and we have a few Markham and he is the manager and the lead for smart building research and the development of certain company. He will share with us what the definition of resilience from utility perspective, from a utility perspective then also we'll discuss two flagship project of a smart neighborhood rounding by certain company, IND group. Then we will move to the industry consortium APRI. We'll discuss with us a group of utility perspective with the definition of resilience, the value of resilience. We have Sarah Bolan-Trantho and she is a strategical issue lead and also the TI technology innovation liaison for APRI's initiative called the Resilience Research Interest Group. Then we'll move to more broader, the federal perspective more than just utility and we also need to coordinate with different agencies. We have Stephen Walsh from Department of Energy Office of Electricity and he has been leading several efforts in the past including the recovery effort for the Hurricanes, Irma and Maria three years ago and also he was the lead author for the Federal Island Playbook and lead the energy transition initiative several years ago. So we will start with Phil, to Sarah, to Stephen to share their perspective about resilience, the value of resilience, the definition of resilience and also several use cases and how the customer DER can bring the value to enhance the system resilience. Okay, with that, I will have Phil to kick off the conversation. Hey, thank you, Liang. Good morning everyone. Good morning everyone to everyone in the U.S. and good afternoon and good evening to international listeners. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Epri and the Stanford Bits and Watch Initiative for hosting the digital grid summer series. I've really enjoyed listening to some of the previous sessions and Southern Company realizes that we need extensive collaboration to realize this integrated grid, the shared integrated grid we're talking about. So this is great. We realize that we're going to need collaboration between industry, technology companies and academic thought leaders as well. So I've really enjoyed listening to some of the previous sessions and based on what I just saw, I'll be listening to some of the coming webinars as well. Before I get into the main part of my presentation today, wanted to give a quick overview of Southern Company through our three electric and four gas utilities. We serve approximately nine million customers across six states, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia. And in addition to our retail state, regulated utility businesses, we also have an independent power producer called Southern Power. We operate in many more states. So we operate in the competitive wholesale markets there. We have gas generation assets as part of that independent power producer. We also have 1.7 gigawatts of solar and 1.6 gigawatts of wind. Southern also owns Power Secure. Power Secure is the largest market grid developer in the US having deployed about 1,700 micro grids and that equates to about 85% of US market share. We are planning for a low carbon future. Our long-term greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal is to have net zero emissions by 2050. And our intermediate goal is for a 50% reduction by 2030 from 2,000 levels. But we think we might get there earlier. We think we might get there by 2025 driven primarily by low natural gas prices. In 2019, we'd already decreased emissions from 2007 levels by 44%. And I just wanted to introduce me really quick. I'm coming to you from Southern Companies Research and Development Group. I lead Southern's research activities around customer energy resources, specifically around energy efficiency, electrification and integrating these resources with the electric power system. I also wanted to say a quick word on why I chose, I personally chose a career in electric power, specifically national and regional electric power grids because I think it's somewhat relevant to our topic today. When I was studying doing my undergraduate electrical engineering degree in Australia, where I'm originally from, it was only then that I first became aware of the complexity and the coordination involved in the electric power system. Everything that it takes to have your light come on when you flick that light switch. And I remember, I think I was in my second or third year about degree, just being really amazed at what was involved. And oh boy, what a time to be joining the industry because that level of coordination, I think we all realize and that level of complexity is about to increase a lot as we seek to extend the grid behind or beyond the meter and integrate millions of customer devices. So, that's definitely something that captivates me still. I am motivated to be part of integrating these devices, keeping our reliability levels high, keeping costs low. I also think it's gonna be a great enable of decarbonization and an enable of greater resiliency. So, I think my motivation for being in the industry actually relates to what we're talking about today. On to the next slide. Yeah, how does Southern think about resiliency? So, I've given an academic definition and then I'll talk about kind of where Southern's at. So, in theory, we think about, this is a good definition, I think. I think it lines up with how Southern company thinks about it, robustness and recovery characteristics of utility infrastructure and operations, which avoid or minimize interruptions of service during an extraordinary or hazardous event. So, as most people on listening will know, resiliency is different to reliability. Reliability in electric power system is the ability for electric power system to respond to fairly normal events that happen in the course of the year, like a generation trip or a transmission line trip due to a lightning strike or something like that. You know, we have our metrics in the industry for reliability. Resiliency is thinking about unusual events, even potentially events that haven't actually happened historically and it's something we take really seriously. Our CEO, Tom Fanning, is actually co-chair of the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, which is an industry government partnership charged with coordinating efforts to prepare for and respond to cyber and physical threats against the electric grid. So, at the highest level, we are Southern companies thinking about this. Now, in practice, how do we, how does it, how does resilience fit into our planning practices? What kind of metrics do we use? How do we value it? I think like a lot of other utilities, we're still grappling with that. So, we do currently strengthen parts of the system that are historically exposed to severe weather. We'll either strengthen the poles on the power delivery system or we'll do undergrounding, but we don't yet have, I would say, a robust framework for the metrics, so both the preparation and then the response to or the valuation. So, I think Southern, and we can continue that conversation, but Southern is part of some industry groups, EPRI is leading one of them that we're part of, where we're thinking about this and trying to put that framework together. And so, going to the world that I live in day to day and the technology and research and development projects, too, I wanted to talk about today, that involve using customer, the assets is our two smart neighborhood projects. So, we have one in Alabama and one in Georgia. The one in Alabama is a few years old now, so we thought that research project has been running for a while. The smart neighborhood project in Atlanta, which is 46 townhomes, is still being built, but the 62 single family home development in Birmingham, Alabama is a more mature research project. Our major research partners with these two projects Oak Ridge National Lab, the DOE Lab and the Electric Power Research Institute. First, just to talk about the Alabama Power Smart Neighborhood. This project, and I could talk about it for a long time, it has a lot of different aspects. But just to give a real quick overview, the project was originally called Neighborhood of the Future because we wanted to think about, okay, what would a neighborhood in say 2030, 2035 look like and how are we gonna serve it? So these homes are extremely energy efficient. They have a home energy rating score in the low 40s for people who are familiar with that system. So very, very tight efficient homes, very efficient heat pump electric, electric heat pump water heating and heat pump space heating and cooling. And in terms of the DR assets and resiliency, this neighborhood has a micro grid located about a mile from the 62 home development that's comprised of solar lithium ion battery and a natural gas generator and the neighborhood can be islanded with the micro grid. And that has happened, we've done it on purpose and then real events have happened and it has worked. So we have successfully islanded that community powering it just off the micro grid, separating it from the rest of our band power system, multiple plans, also share that we've had issues with it as well, hasn't always worked. And I remember talking to one of our power electronics experts about that. And one of the things he pointed out to me, because I was wondering, your micro-guides have been around for a long time. Why are we having issues here? And one of the things he pointed out to me was micro-guides have been around a long time as islanded power systems, when you have them normally connected to the grid and then need them to be able to switch out an island, that just adds a lot of complexity. And so, it's a research project, so we expected everything not to go perfect, but yeah, I just wanna say that it has worked most of the time. I think it is a success, but there was a learning curve there. And one of the things that's really interesting as a researcher, you work really hard on having everything come together back to the earlier comment about the light switch, turning the light on when you flick it. When everything worked perfectly, the micro grid powered the neighborhood, the customers in the neighborhood didn't even know. You know, and I remember joking with someone on the team, Kasha, I wish we could, how can we get a pat on the back for this? To show that everything worked and hey, everyone else lost power because you're part of this research project, we were able to keep you online. And that goes back to just thinking about electricity, it's just something that you really, most people don't notice unless it's not there. And so yeah, we can talk more about that project later. I'm happy to answer any questions. Just in the interest of time, jumping over to the Georgia Palace, Montenegro, Atlanta. These are town homes built five, six, seven, or eight kind of together. So they are sharing one wall. Sometimes two walls of course, they're in the middle. These homes in terms of DR assets have batteries in the garage. And so we have not the whole home, but we have some loads on a critical load panel and we're powering in the instance of a grid outage, we're powering certain loads in that home. In both neighborhoods, we're controlling the water heaters and the HVAC systems in response to different grid signals. So we're experimenting with how can we provide grid services from these devices without causing the customer any discomfort or interruption. And I'll just say before I move to the next slide, one of the, and I think we'll talk more about this. One of the dilemmas you're faced with when you have either a microgrid or a behind the meter asset like storage is how much energy do you keep in reserve for a reliability or a resiliency event and how much do you use it for grid services. So if theoretically, so I can tell you my wife in living in Alabama in July or August in the middle of the day, she's going to put a very high value on having energy in the battery if it's able to power the HVAC and keep the house cool with four small children. And so in that instance, there's going to be a trade-off there between resiliency and using these DVR assets for grid flexibility and integrating renewables. I think there's a conversation we could have there about that balance and how we think that's going to play out. Customer, the resiliency value. So really what I wanted to say here is resiliency like a lot of other attributes that we're thinking about when we think about distributed energy resources is it's something that there's a lot of debate over in terms of its valuation. So putting resiliency to the side for a second, what are some of the other attributes that we hear in the industry being spoken about? We hear peak demand, shaving, distribution, system deferral, spinning reserve, provision of spinning reserve if you have a generation trip event. There are all these different values that we're seeking to stack. Resiliency in my mind would be another one. Sometimes these things you can't align. I gave that example of maybe resiliency and providing some of these other services orthogonal in terms of being able to optimize them. So that's something we should think about. I heard one of the panelists in a previous presentation talk about how in terms of load flexibility, TOU rates, as we see a lot of different regions around the US and the world really roll those out on mass. I think you're actually gonna be a really good way of seeing a customer's response to price. I think we'll get a lot of information there about how customers respond to that, how much flexibility there really is there. My thoughts are probably with resiliency, especially if we get to a technology point where we can actually leverage behind a meter assets and power other things on the distribution feeder. So once we change inverse standards and we have the right switching intelligence, I could say power in my neighbor's house. He doesn't have solar, but I do. That is gonna be something that I think is really exciting. But I think that a lot of these values we probably need to prove operationally before we defer the capital decisions or reliability decisions. So I think we probably need, I think TOU rates will give us a lot of information about load flexibility, how much we can rely on that load. Will it be there when we really need it, especially in extreme ambient temperatures? I think we just need a lot of field data to kind of get comfortable with what resource will be there. I think valuing it in terms of its operational value will be helpful. And then we can probably get to a point where we can actually integrate it into the planning process. But happy to take questions on that and debate that, debate that more. I'll just finish with, I think however you do value resiliency, probably it has to go beyond just the unserved load calculation. So what was it kind of worth within the utility business model? A kilowatt hour is really there to support comfort health and quality of life. And so I think we do need to capture the full value of that. And with that, I'm gonna end. Thank you. Wonderful. Phil, thank you very much. That was a fabulous presentation, a lot there. Appreciate that. We're gonna transition over to Sarah Mullen-Trento from Epri to talk about our value resilience interest group. So Sarah, the floor is yours. Great. Can everybody hear me okay? Okay. Fantastic. Really excited to be here today and get the chance to talk with all of you about the interest group we've been, excuse me, running for the past few months and excited to follow Phil and proceed DOE in hearing more about this really important topic. In hearing from Phil already, we heard a little bit about what resilience means. And when we look at reliability and resilience just to provide some context for this discussion, in general, when we talk about resilience, we're talking about longer duration outages, high impact, low frequency events, something that has a bigger geographic impact. And while these may be similar events or similar build back restoration just on a bigger scale, the cost is different. We're really at a point where we understand that when you get longer duration outages where you move beyond simple conveniences and really get into a comfort and health and safety space, the economic and social impact just doesn't scale from what it looks like with an outage of just a few minutes. And when we look at how we will support customers in those longer outages and ultimately this does come right back to customers and society and the impacts that long duration outages or simply disruptions in your everyday activity impact people. And we are in a unique position right now to be able to look at really diverse solutions that have different levels of scope. It may be something that an individual customer invests in it may be something that is a community scale or even grid scale solution. There are different levels of societal benefit. If I'm doing something to support myself which does help support resilience of the system versus something that will benefit directly, benefit many customers and understanding what solutions or what portfolio of solutions of different scale and benefit is needed or fits the bill for a desired level of resilience. We do need to start talking about frameworks and metrics and just a ton of great work has gone on in this space trying to figure out how we do this planning across these different dimensions. And the piece that we really focus on in this every interest group is valuation in order to make decisions about what investments make the most sense. We are interested in getting to a place where we can put as Bill introduced, put some value on those kilowatt hours that are not served. And doing so becomes increasingly challenging as we rely more on electricity, particularly for something like electric transportation. How does that change the value of a kilowatt hour when people may be relying on that to evacuate or if response leads are relying on that to help restore and serve customers? How does it change as we also possibly start to rely on clean electricity for our fuel needs if we have electric fuels and renewable gas that we're using. And we also know that there's changing, something for the system in terms of climate adaptation and what we're building back to or what we're trying to, the value that customers see and the needs that they have may change over time as well. So huge opportunities here. People are keenly interested in, unfortunately sometimes because of events and the need to respond or prepare. In coming to a place where we have transparent approaches to doing this valuation and estimating outage costs so that we can efficiently and more expediently make these investments. We've convened this interest group this year and it really awesome activity bringing together our vast network of subject matter experts at EFRI. We do a lot of work ourselves in threats and risk assessments and looking at infrastructure, hardening opportunities, customer resilience solutions, economics, utility programs, et cetera. And then bringing in all the stuff that's been going on within the industry as well. There's just been a ton of work going on in the space of resilience, frameworks, metrics, valuation, a lot going on in the US, a lot going on internationally through the national grids in the US. So really great opportunity to bring together all of that information and work and with multiple stakeholders get an agreed upon set of gaps. And from that, draft a research roadmap for putting together some of these tools and bringing some of these novel approaches to valuation into a strategic plan and then starting the scope and then get into some of the research in the coming years, excuse me. It just to provide some context while we are really focused on the value piece and estimating costs, we do know that along with that we're trying to understand what is the resilience gap to fill? Where are we trying to get? What do we get from resilience solutions? How do they impact resilience or allow us to better mitigate, adapt or restore from outages? We want to understand all of the benefits or the impacts from those solutions. And then ultimately we're driving towards that business case or that bottom line benefits that tells us that here's the order in which or here's a way that we can prioritize these investments. And driving home again, that we're really focused on the outage cost estimates, although they're used in all of these frameworks and in pieces. We do have a number of folks that are participating in this collaboration this year, including a number of utility partners. Southern Company has several reps on this interest group. And we have really broad participation across a range of types of utilities. We've got major research organizations that have been working in the metrics and valuations space, NAIRU, NASEO, the state energy offices, international regulatory participation and really honored to have the DOE Office of Electricity and Edison Electric Institute as key participants as well. So it's a really neat engagement if you're interested in learning more. A lot of the discussion focuses on what we're trying to accomplish in investing in resilience solutions. And we talk a lot about well understood and some even novel approaches to doing valuation. And some of these slides are a little bit of an eye chart and more for reference materials. So, but we take a look at a number of different ways of coming at valuation, looking at bottom up approaches where we're asking customers to tell us what they would prefer. We look at what customers have actually done their reveal behavior, understanding what measures people invest in currently to avoid outages and increase their own reliability can tell you a lot. They typically don't arrive at the same place. We can look at insurance loss data and try to extrapolate. There's Alexa reminding me to put my water. So I've got a little resilience update from her. And then there are ways to come at this from the top as well. And we can look at on a regional or on an economy level when you have a disruption or you have some change in supply and in this case, electric supply. How does that ripple through the economy and ultimately disrupt supply and economic activities and customers? I've included a few examples in these slides that folks can take a look at by in looking across regulatory filings related to resilience. There's a great neighborhood document that talks about how folks have come about this in different ways. The ICE calculator is a really popular way to estimate customer willingness to pay or the business impacts of outages with some limitations. So you do see a lot of the ICE calculator used. However, to date there hasn't been a regulatory filing for customer cited or microgrid types of resilience solutions where estimating the value of resilience has gotten the thumbs up from the governance and stakeholders involved. So while there are ways to estimate some of these costs, they're not at a point where everybody agrees, yes, that value does represent not just the direct impacts to the folks in the microgrid, but also the benefits to the rest of the community, the rest of the region, how do you parse that out and recover those costs? So that is to say that we are at a place where people are keenly interested in making these investments and justifying them in a way that allows us to quickly get solutions put into place. And in this interest group, we will be spending the remainder of our webcast focused on specific approaches and harder to quantify or value pieces. And we've asked participants to look at a number of costs that come as a result of long duration electric outages and ask folks to prioritize which components do you need to be estimating? Why is that piece useful and what's the challenge in estimating that today? In hearing from our participants, it's not surprising that really understanding for long duration outages, what business interruptions cost, what is the damage or the cost when you have essential facilities that are not available or damaged infrastructure? What is the cost if you cannot get out and access resources within your community and you have to go further in order to get your needs met? And then, of course, probably the hardest one to estimate loss of comfort certainty and connection. So we'll be getting into these spaces over the next four months and really looking at what R&D is needed in order to allow us to start making some of these estimates and what tools are needed to start capturing some of these and giving us the ability to combine. I have a slide in here that just speaks to the scope. The cost aspect of resilience is not unlike other aspects. It's tricky and it depends on who you're talking about, who's investing, who's approving, what threat you're talking about. And different stakeholders and governance involve no matter what angle you're talking about or across some of these different categories. And then also just to pull us back up again, while we focus very specifically in the interest group on valuation, that builds into investment decisions and ultimately every piece of our utility system is leaving that resilience piece in the planning in a different way. So being able to understand how customer-cited solutions, DER, how all of that could then come back and be operationalized or be taken into account as you're doing your planning for your distribution, for your transmission, for your resources is really key and that's a big part of this conversation is how do we get value so that we can talk across those different levels. One of the biggest challenges folks are interested in doing here is being able to do things like value DER solutions alongside more traditional resilience solutions, accounting for distributional effects, which is a big piece of the data platform opportunity is really understanding what locational resources and preferences look like and being able to maybe measure some of those spillover effects or understand how impacts spread around. And I would invite you to please reach out if you're interested in participating. If you have feedback on valuation gaps and experiences beyond what we hear about today, I'd love to hear about that. We've got upcoming webcast throughout the rest of this year before we finish out our roadmap. And thank you for your time. Wonderful, Sarah, thank you very much. And it's very thoughtful and a lot of information there. So just a quick reminder for the audience, if you have a question, you can type your question on the chat function. If you go down below of your screen, you will see an icon and you can type your question through the chat function. So now we will transition from a group of utility perspective to the federal perspective. We will have Steven Walsh from Department of Energy to share with us his perspective and the federal's perspective. Steven. Thank you and thank you Omar for having me. I'm really happy to be here with my other distinguished panelists. And hopefully you'll hear some recurring themes in my few slides that you've heard already from Phil and Sarah. And hopefully a little bit of new information as well. As you see here on the title slide, this is a, after talking about definitions, we'll talk a little bit about my perspective on the Hurricane Maria recovery work that we've done following Puerto Rico. I just to flag that there was huge team effort. Phil mentioned Power Secure earlier. They were definitely involved. There's hundreds and thousands of folks involved in the effort. So I don't want to take any undue credit for quote leading that response or anything, but this is my perspective on that. Here's some thoughts from my corner of that work. So for resilience for the definition, I have a luxury oftentimes as a federal employee of having my mind made up for me. The definition of resilience is one of those. It is defined for us in the Presidential Policy Directive 21. You see the definition there on the screen. I have highlighted the key phrases in bold, I think the prepare for and adapt to changing conditions, withstand disruptions and recover rapidly from disruptions that to me are the working parts of that definition. It's not the only one, as you all will know. Sarah talked about how to define it. So to Phil, there's dozens or even 100 and some depending on how you count them definition doubt in the wild of resilience with regard to infrastructure systems. You see two citations down there. For anyone who's looking for an academic paper on the subject, I highly recommend the paper by IUB called Systems Resilience for Multihazard Environments. It to me is a very good overview of the rigorous approach to resilience that I think is excellence and kind of underscores how much more work there is in front of us. So those key phrases from before that were in bold can imply a few different capacities in order to implement it. One is planning capacity. If we can't plan for an event, then resilience would be hollow. Phil mentioned some hardening of some infrastructure that's in there. We've got efficient redundancies and that's to me that's another way of saying recover rapidly. During an event, especially of the type that Sarah identified, the high impact, low frequency variety, there will be asset failures and the question, the challenge to us is to identify how to make redundancies for those asset failures efficient. There's something even a little bit more complex I think in the definition of resilience and that's adapt to changing conditions. To me, that implies that there's more than one equilibrium state. In other words, depending on the threat that you're facing, system operations might be facing different temporary steady states if you will, for lack of a more artful way of putting that. So the system has to be able to serve people where they are. And that service has to be threat-neutral or multi-hazard. So wind and water together for a hurricane or Superstorm Sandy or hopefully some man-made event, combination with natural event, hopefully we can receive that. But it's really more, there's a planning element to it. And as we've discussed so far here and with Sarah and Phil, it's not exactly easy to put your finger on what resilience is or how to measure it. So we're in OE, the Office of Electricity where I work, we're thinking through it from a number of different perspectives. It's been an increasing focus for the office the past few years and there are a number of folks in the building working on it. So there's more than any one person can keep track of. I know Phil and Sarah have both mentioned projects that I'm not involved with and they're both great portfolios. So just I underscore that if you wanna know everything that DOE is doing in resilience, we might not have time to tell you everything before a new project starts. And on that note, I just wanna plug, there was the Building Technologies Office in the Office of Electricity and Renewable Energy had a request for information closed a few weeks ago regarding connected communities. And those RFI's often precedes funding opportunity announcements, so that's one thing to keep an eye on. I see one question about transactive energy so far. You know that the focus of connected communities and that RFI welcomes any comments on transactive energy. So if folks are interested in that, they can go look at the RFI responses and then stay tuned to the Building Technologies Office for anything that might be coming out in the next few months. But within OE, we're looking at the context of things, characterizing threats, Phil mentioned, elasticity and demand and whether it can be shifted from one time to another. And Sarah mentioned the kind of top down or bottom up approaches to things. And that's, we're looking at the burden to access critical services. So you're an individual in a given place, something bad is happening, you need to get to a hospital. How much of a burden is it for you to get from where you are to the hospital you need? Part of that's looking at flexibility. It's in part system availability, particularly at the bulk power level, but there's also a consequence aspect to it because as we, by definition, if we're in a high impact, low frequency event, there will be asset failures and there will be consequences. The quick, the challenge is how do we identify what those consequences on actual humans will be and mitigate them? So part of that gas and potential solutions, we've got some modeling efforts going on, looking at DER, microgrid, sensors, metrics, maturity models, I think maturity models might be a particularly useful paradigm for this space. One thing in particular that I'm interested in and I'll talk a little bit more in the remaining slides is linking bulk power availability to access to services at Grid Edge. And then of course, all of this has to be coordinated across different stakeholders and levels of governance that don't always share the same perspective or evaluate trade-offs the same way. So establishing a framework to do that, facilitate those discussions will be important. In Hurricane Maria, we see here on this slide the variety of different analyses that the national labs undertook as part of recovery efforts. We'll be focusing mostly on that last bucket, distribution and edge. For folks that have seen them before, the system advisory model and PV loss out of NREL are fantastic tools to value PV installations and there's some distributed storage being incorporated into those tools as well. So folks that know it, continue, please continue to use it for the folks that know Sam and PV loss are both excellent at NREL. NREL also helps work on DER interconnection standards and FEDS recommendations back to the relevant stakeholders before we go. Sandia is working a little bit on feeder hosting methodology, but I really want to focus on the final two, which is contingencies at the edge and how to use GIS to improve resiliency. If anybody has questions about the other buckets or other work that we've done in this space, we're happy to field those offline. So one of the tools that has been developed and we have two labs working on this together is GIS mapping of critical facilities by feeder. It's sort of like a distribution heat map for those of you that know what those are, but it tells you the feeders adjacent to critical facilities of different stripes, the customers that it serves, the number of outages and other related information. We're still working on bulking this up, but I think there's a lot of potential with this approach to help people understand where the high priority sites for resilience microgrids could be. And a little bit more practical side, the Sandia and Oak Ridge also worked to identify where microgrids could be placed at industrial sites to keep industrial facilities up and running in Puerto Rico, working with the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company. And they use a tool called a microgrid design tool. For those of you familiar with it, hopefully you think that it's as great as I do, but for others, please go, you can search for it on the web, microgrid design tool. It's a Excel-based model, but you can actually do some one-line diagrams and you can do valuation and see what different asset portfolios and even a little bit on the operational side, what different operational stuff would do to the overall value of your microgrid. It's a helpful kind of tool to go from the ideation stage towards the procurement. It doesn't get you all the way there, but it's quite useful, at least I think it is. This is what you see here is a picture of the burden to access critical services measured by Sandia National Labs. There's a guy there, Bobby Jeffers, and other, he works with a team there. All of this stuff is a team effort, so don't wanna, it's just hard to acknowledge everybody all the time. But he's developed, they have developed a methodology and they call it REDCAT. I wasn't involved with the naming, don't blame me, but you can find it if you search for that. The methodology accounts for the burden on individuals to access a wide basket of critical services in the case of an abat or an outage. So it has, you can, unlike a top-down approach where you hit tractability problems, moving beyond a single threat, this bottom-up approach can look a little bit more at multi-hazards or different hazards and kind of combine them all together. And it compares the cost of no mitigation versus a portfolio of distributed energy resources, including microgrids. So you can look at, here's an event or here's what the risk, the burden to access critical services would be if we don't do anything and here's what it would be if we under different portfolios of DER and microgrid deployments. It's a really good methodology, you see the link to the paper there. I'm not sure of how you would be happy to answer questions about that if anyone's interested in digging into it a little bit more. But what we see from the results is that microgrids can be a key strategy to dock the tail of high impact events. So you see as the histogram here is in the back, the gray is no DER and microgrid portfolio versus the blue, which there is a typo on this slide for anyone who's already reading halfway down in the bullets. The cost of the portfolio identified in blue is not 1,100, it's 110. It's still kind of an eye-watering figure, but it's, I mean, if someone tells you it's 110, not 1,100, it sounds better. Not intentional, that is a typo, it's supposed to be 110. So we can see with this approach, you can actually with some rigor evaluate what the mitigated consequences actually look like for a portfolio of distributed resources. It's hard to say, and it's gonna vary from place to place, which is why context is important, whether that 100 billion or just hypothetically, let's say in some scenarios, there is a trillion dollar DER portfolio that someone manages to compute. Let's just go with that. Is that worth the mitigated consequences? It's hard to say in advance. So it's really gonna matter having a discourse among the relevant stakeholders in a given place. Because if someone who bears the brunt of a hurricane might say, yeah, that is 100% worth it, no question. And then someone who, but someone who doesn't feel the impact might have a different answer to that. So even though we can do this rigorous work and get to a point where we can produce this histogram here, we still have a lot of work to do, helping various stakeholders come to an agreement on what investment is worthwhile and what should be approved by regulators. And Phil and Sarah both kind of hinted at with resilience in particular, it's extra challenging to get approval for these events, for resilience investments rather. Because I mean, you can find it's almost anything that has predictable remnants. But when it's infrastructure for a low frequency event, the cash flow isn't predictable. So you have to think of traditional financing won't necessarily work. You can think of resilience like Phil mentioned as part of a value stack and that might work. But then you're still left with the challenge of figuring out what the sweetener is to get over the line of the extra cost for resilience versus not having those assets in the portfolio. And the one thing we're actively working on now is linking the DER portfolio work that Sandia has done with both power availability that has happened at Pacific Northwest National Lab. In a nutshell, at PNNL, they have looked at using dynamic contingency analysis and high fidelity GIS information. What different storms result in different outage profiles? And obviously you're stacking a bunch of assumptions in these models for anybody who's digging into the math of measuring resilience. That's just part of the territory right now. But they've done a really good job at setting up a methodology that allows you to evaluate the single threat in a given place very, very well. So what we'd like to do is link them together. You see at the top some illustrative portfolios from PNNL where the hurricane is the red circle moving across and in sequence in the third snapshot and the upper right, I think that's upper right for you guys, you have an outage. Whereas on the other image opposite that illustrative portfolio too, the hurricane is able to move across the system without a full system outage, but you still see some stresses and some outages. At the distribution level, we know, or the utility should know, whether what their feeders look like from a safety and KB perspective. And you see representations of that in the bottom there. So what we're looking at now is linking up problem feeders and bulk power outages given different circumstances so that you can say, well, to help prioritize where a DER portfolio or microgrid would have the most impact in mitigating consequences. So that's what we're kind of working on right now. I hope that no one was waiting for me to demystify all of this. I think it's complex and there isn't, we're just dealing with complexity right now, which is another reason why I think maturity models will be helpful for all of us going forward and working through these questions. As you see here, just some of the complexity. If you want to have a resilient system, you need a bunch of different capacities. You've got the planning capacity I mentioned at the beginning of my session, but you also need the baseline. And as part of that base lining is determining what the bounds of your system may be. If you're Southern company, you might, or Georgia Power, you might say, well, my system is the asset that I own. But from a resilience perspective, as Phil indicated that on his last slide, that might not be the most useful definition of system. If you're trying to get at resilience and you've defined your system to be bulk power available, I mean, it's sort of the question of what's the value of having a kilowatt hour, having a line energized if there's no one there to use it. So if you've got all, if you've got most of your lines up and running, but everyone's evacuated or tried to evacuate and they got stuck because they couldn't charge their electric vehicles or the emergency shelter loss power, from a resilient, if you're looking at it from the lens of resilience, defining what your system actually is, takes on, I think, somewhat unique importance. And of course, there's also a recovery capacity. Hardening the system is part of that, and that's a lot like normal reliability, but there's also for a high impact, low frequency event, it gets a little bit more complicated. I think one thing, one key takeaway, I'm gonna emphasize for everyone, at least from how I think about resilience, is that it's more than just asset performance. I think we can make, you know, some, we can make a grid bulletproof. I get literally, unfiguratively, but that doesn't necessarily answer the question of whether or not it's resilient. Because like Phil mentioned, the kilowatt hour only has value if someone's there to use it. So there's this, it's a little bit more complex of a system. With that, I'll close and happy to field any questions. Terrific, great. Thank you, Steven. Very good, very good. So, already perfect. That's what I will try to ask about. Can you pull back to the slide number six? Anyway, so let me have one question and kind of warm up the Q and A. Just another reminder for the audience, please type your question to the chat or the Q and A and Oman and I are going to pick up these questions later. So we have heard from three of you of different demonstration and pilot projects like certain companies that's my neighborhood and every talk about the PEPCOS microgrid and Steven mentioned that there's tons of DOE research or development projects going on. Then the question is we realize a lot of entities export opportunity to enhance resilience through either the connected buildings, customer DERs. How can we move from pilot or demonstration to the next phase? How can we scale up these technologies? So let's go from Phil, Sara and to Steve. Sure. Yeah, great question. It's something that we are absolutely thinking about as fun as it is as a researcher to play with these technologies in two real neighborhoods in the southeast. We want to see if they can scale. I would sort of approach the answer to this question in a couple of ways. We are seeing some deployments at scale today. So there are places, there are utilities around the U.S., Europe, Australia that are using batteries behind the meter, significant numbers. I think South Australia probably has the largest with 50,000 batteries planned. So those models usually are market-based with some kind of incentive. So the customer is sort of paying a portion, either they pay upfront or they pay a monthly fee for a level of backup power for their own premise. But it's subsidized by the value that that asset can provide to the rest of the grid. So I think the first answer is, I think there's a market-based solution that utilities can try with different business models. I would also say that, having thought about this a little bit, a lot of these, without naming the companies that are offering these kind of products, if it isn't the utility, generally they're not every segment of society. It's not low-income customers that are participating in general. So I think utilities and with regulators help can play a role there to make sure that folks aren't left behind in terms of making their own home resilient, especially in a situation where a lot of us are working remotely and rely on internet and power to work and be productive. Sarah, anything you want to add here? Yeah, a little high-level, but I would just say that one thing I see as being key is I think we've got a lot of really smart people working on the approaches to estimating the value and cost or the benefits that would come from solutions. And the Bobby Jeffries example is just it's really great, really cool work. So the technical stuff, I'm confident that all the really smart people on this call will bring what we need, but aligning the different people involved in this decision-making is to me the trickier part. So really understanding that resilience needs and planning criteria across the board from the region to the state, city, county, being able to estimate the benefits and the impacts for those different levels so that people across the board can quickly sign off on these investments for the sake of resilience. So not because resilience is stacked on top, but simply based on the value that they'll provide for customers. Yeah, just to agree with their responses so far, especially Phil, I think relying on the market forces to make this work. That might mean, that's gonna meet some evolution, I think, in business models and regulator thinking and looking a little bit more at rewarding performance and thinking electricity is more of a service and rather than a commodity. And we're starting to do that in bits and pieces and take steps and at those conversations mature, I think the outcome that Sarah wants where people get much more comfortable with seeing what a resilience portfolio looks like will happen naturally, but it's gonna take a bunch of discourse in the beginning and the market does that extremely well. Right, I have a question and we'll get to a couple of questions that have come in on the chat, but just thinking about the notion of high impact, low frequency events, I think one can't help but think about the current situation with the pandemic and the sort of that underscores the importance of preparing for such events and so in that regard, with respect to customer DERs, they introduced a great deal of just the sheer numbers of PD systems, storage, other kinds of things. It's great resource potential for mitigation but also introduces a great deal of complexity and thinking about, especially in this time where we're looking at the possibility of events like the storms that Stephen mentioned along with disruptions caused by wildfires in California where I am, the importance of being able to look at these impacts and the value of continuity of electricity, especially during a time where people are sheltering in place largely. So just a question across the board about with respect to how we value resiliency in terms of situations like we're in the midst of a pandemic and dealing with that, how does that change the dynamics and are there ways that we can have mechanisms, pricing and valuation mechanisms to account for these types of dynamics? So I'll open that up for everyone to comment on. I don't know, Sarah, you wanna get started on that one since it's related to the value of resiliency? Oh, Sarah, I think you're on mute. And I'm on mute, yes. Thank you. I think that the pandemic and the current situation has really fundamentally changed our capabilities and in understanding customer value or what it means to customer is to have certainty or to human beings to have certainty. And so we really are in a unique place right now where stated preferences may be a tricky thing to really gauge what people want or need when you haven't experienced something. We're in a unique place now where we can gauge across the board and really have conversations about what it means to be cut off or to feel cut off. And I think also really interesting time and Omar, some of the work that's going on with Run With It and looking at data, just the ability to get into customer willingness to pay and look at how that changes as people experience events and how that even changes once you've experienced many and how it may drop off really unique opportunity. Phil, any thoughts you'd like to add on that? No, I would echo Sarah, yep. Steven? Just one thought, there's an IEEE paper that IEEE develops on COVID impacts and it's worth a read, just to pull that. Okay, let me try to pick up one question here. First, let me read the question and then I want to pivot the question a little bit as a slightly different way. So the question is, have the presenters had exposed experience with transactive energy approach to microgrid operations? That's exactly the question we received. Then what I'm trying to ask is that there's several different concepts floating around in the industry. One is a virtual power plant and transactive energy. And also we talk about, we think we talk about a microgrid. And the VPP and transactive energy is more like in-complete, multi-pricing mechanism to reflect the value of 100,000 connected devices or DERs. Then we talk about the value resilience today and from all of you and how we can incorporate some mechanism, could it be pricing? Could it be different mechanism? Into the platform, a data platform be able to reflect the value of reasoning? So it's two question, one is any experience you have for transactive energy for microgrid operation? Second is, how can we incorporate certain mechanism, could it be pricing, be able to concede resilience into any data platform? We talk about like a virtual power plant, transactive energy, et cetera. I can have a stab first. Yes, we have had experience. So both the projects that I mentioned and I know I go off there quite quickly, just the technical detail, really the key research element was the transactive energy piece, which is what Oak Ridge National Lab is bringing to the projects. So in the case of the Alabama Power Smart neighborhood, a price signal is being sent to a group of assets, being the community microgrid and then the water heaters and HVACs in the 62 homes. And so there's sort of a two layer platform there where you've got a price signal coming into an aggregator and then you are modeling the capabilities of each individual home. You're looking at things like, okay, is the price, if I'm trying to minimize costs for the customer, is the price of pre-cooling, is the additional energy I'm gonna use, say pre-cooling the home to ride through a peak later in the day, kind of outweigh getting through the peak. So you're looking, so what we've found, you start to get experience with, okay, the arbitrage amount has to be a certain amount. Now, you may be optimizing the other things, not just price. So we experimented with, well, let's maximize the use of the solar in the microgrid. So if there's a cloud comes over the microgrid, okay, maybe we pause the water heating and the cooling or the heating of the house and then start it back up again when the cloud comes over to maximize the self-consumption of the solar. And so, yes, we do have experience with that, the topic that is top of mind for us. And to the second question, I can't think of another way other than price to incorporate it in. So I'd love to hear thoughts from either listeners or other panelists first off, what else we could use to incorporate resiliency. I'd be really interested here. Any other thoughts? Yeah, just I'll add a colleague of mine, Chris Irwin, I think spoke a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully he touched on transactive energy and his portfolio in that space. I think prices, the mechanism we're all familiar with and but the Sarah's point, I think discovering what people's willingness to pay in an actual resilience event is gonna be hard, very hard to do. But yeah, I mean, from a transactive standpoint, once you've got the contractual mechanisms on customer sovereignty hashed out, it's all about the auto retrosh and making. And just, you know, the dynamics of that, we might end up discovering fundamentals that we can model, you know, across the country or across climate zones, like temperature ranges and so on, but it's still gonna matter from neighborhood to neighborhood almost, especially if it hasn't been built from the ground up. Like, if you don't know that the houses perform in a similar way from an envelope and eating cooling perspective and things like that, you've increased the amount of complexity that you need to understand in order to actually price things appropriately. And, you know, I think there's just a lot of work left to do to really get a mature understanding of what that looks like. Yeah, if I can add a final thought. I think understanding what portion of the value may be something that could be a price mechanism versus something that's risk avoidance because there's a value to people inherently in avoiding risk, whether or not it ever materializes, that's one value that's kind of your day-to-day security blanket. And then there is that maybe very real, if there's an event value that may be much more, may be much easier to tie to a price or when you're actually trying to operationalize assets and call upon stuff, understand capabilities and have some kind of a financial inducement. So interesting because that value comes in a couple of different ways and how that is brought to the customer or how you induce customers to act upon that is, yeah, it could be complex. I'm gonna ask, and we've got about eight minutes left. So we'll try to go a little bit more rapid fire here. We have a question and this is, how might we leverage electric vehicles for residential resilience? I, the questioner, figured out how to power my house from my car for less than $50 cat-backs due to PG&E's public safety power shut-offs. So the question is, leveraging EVs for resilience, open for any one of our speakers. Great question. Love that question. Yeah, I think, I mean, electric transportation in general is gonna be the biggest change to electric grid as transportation gets electrified that maybe we've had since the creation of the electric power grid. It's gonna be a huge, huge thing. Yeah, when you start thinking about electric vehicles, answering this specific question that, for personal use, having 100 kilowatt hour batteries and then realizing that most stationary storage batteries that are being put behind the meter today are anywhere from maybe eight to 16, 17, 18 kilowatt hours, you realize the resource that is there if you can discharge the battery. So I think there are many days, just to confess to who knows how many people on the call, that I'll be working on deeply in the area leveraging, say, residential water heating, electric water heating, or space heating and cooling. And there'll be days when I think, gosh, is this gonna just hail into insignificance if you can leverage electric vehicle batteries because the resource size is just so much larger. Now, I think it's probably both and, I think both can play a role, but yeah, I think electric vehicles are a huge resource to tap into. Very, very exciting area. And we are doing some research in that area. Steven, Sarah, anything you'd like to add? You know, I think it's incredibly compelling and I'd be interested to see how do you again do that kind of shifting the value from one player to another to make business cases. Right now, I think there's just such a barrier because the product comes from an automaker and there's not a lot of incentive or not a market for them to make even, you know, like a $50 upgrade to their vehicles if customers aren't asking for it or using that as a main decision point in purchasing vehicles. So tremendous opportunity to find a way to translate that value and connect those dots. It's just, yeah, huge potential resource if we can get that straight note. Yeah, just to follow up quickly, there with, as we see more and more variety of electric vehicles out there serving different markets, pickups, SUVs, people will migrate to that technology. If you haven't test driven an electric vehicle yet, I highly recommend that you go, that you do so as an owner of myself, fantastic piece of hardware. And yeah, if at some point I could use that to provide backup power in my house, I mean, the battery's sitting in my garage right now. So I would love to be able to do that. Energy Systems Integration Facility at NREL is working on some vehicle to grid technologies looking at different batteries, inverter settings and how they work well together. So that's one place to check out. But if that's how cutting edge that particular issue is, well, yeah, you can definitely make it work. You can make your house top to your car if you've got, don't try that at home unless you're properly certified to do so. It's really cutting edge, I think, especially for the mass market. Perfect, we have about three or four minutes left. So let's try to wrap this up for this week's conversation. Last question is more like a magical one type of question. So in all the extreme events are very hard to predict and it's also the cost is very hard to, you know, hardening a system and it's very hard to justify and either taxpayer or rate payer, whatever would pay for it. Then if you can do one thing, you know, and be able to utilize any kind of data platform or methodology to unlock the value for all different type of players like the customer, the DR provider, the utility and because utility is a highly regulated business we have federal, we have state. So what is the magic one you are going to use and why? Like a minute, maybe less than a minute for each of you. Okay, I've got a magic one. Who I would make, not so much a platform, I would make the data ubiquitous and easy to access just if you could just unlock the data, get rid of that chicken and egg, you need the data to understand the business case, you need a business case to justify getting the data and to understand what architecture to put in so that you have a great long lasting investment that you never question and gets you 20 years out. So I would just unlock the data and take all of the questions of availability and getting to it and who owns it just totally off the table. Perfect, unlock the data, right? Yeah, I would agree. And actually had, I'd written down literally the words chicken or egg in my answer. So that's good. Yeah, I would say, I guess codes and standards for a common data sharing platform because I think sometimes codes and standards can be the spark to kind of get you past the chicken or the egg issue that Sarah was talking about. Yep. Those are both excellent answers. I think if we had a third wave of the wand, I would add customer engagement with their consumption because right now, there's time to use rights might help but right now, there's no incentive to defer your consumption peak exists because of the way the prices are set and established and we need to fundamentally change that service customer relationship in order for the data platform to have the impact that it's supposed to. Wonderful. So Omar, I will hand this to you to wrap up today's conversation. Sure. So on that magical note, I just wanna first thank our speakers for a great panel, Phil, Sarah, Steven. This was fabulous. We covered a lot of ground. I think there were some other questions that the people had, we weren't able to get in in time but please feel free to reach out to the speakers or to the moderators if there are any specific questions that we're able to get to. But again, on behalf of Liang and the Stanford bits and lots initiative from FB, you wanna thank everyone for being a part of this webinar. Two and in same time next week for next week's session focusing on transmission system operator perspectives and electricity, wholesale electricity markets and the impact of digital grid and customer technologies in that space. So again, thank you so much for participating. We're gonna be closing and to have a great rest of the week. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.