Grid reliability and resilience are foundational to meeting electricity needs and have significant economic and societal impacts. Traditional reliability and emerging resilience metrics may not fully recognize benefits from distributed energy resources (DERs) such as energy efficiency.

This technical brief explains how existing planning processes for bulk power and distribution systems capture the impact of energy efficiency on power system reliability and resilience with illustrative examples. We identify limitations in using existing reliability and resilience metrics to quantify efficiency and other DER benefits. The brief concludes with a discussion of opportunities to enhance current planning practices to better capture the reliability and resilience value of energy efficiency.

Read the report.