In this age of climate impacts and extreme weather events, Quanta Technology provides services to evaluate and improve transmission system resiliency. Our capabilities encompass a spectrum of resiliency elements, including wildfire risks, earthquake vulnerability, gas/fuel disruption scenarios, CIP-014-2 requirements (R1 and R2), extreme weather, and aging infrastructure. We base our approach on a combination of in-house tools and commercial software that cover a broad range of resiliency subjects.
Grid Resiliency and Physical Security
Resiliency Program – Infrastructure Hardening and Recovery Strategy
Reliability is a well understood concept, but resiliency is relatively new. The effectiveness of a resilient infrastructure or enterprise depends upon its ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive event. Examples of events that test a system’s resilience include severe natural events (wildfires, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and earthquakes) , coordinated, extensive physical attacks and cyberattacks , and geomagnetic disturbances on the electrical—or the supporting telecom and gas—infrastructure.
Resilience is typically achieved through hardening or recovery. Hardening refers to physically changing infrastructure to make it less susceptible to damage. Hardening improves the durability and stability of energy infrastructure, making it better able to withstand the impacts of hurricanes, weather events or attacks. Recovery, by contrast, refers to the ability of an energy facility to recover quickly. This includes identifying and addressing aging infrastructure, pre-emptive planning and design for extreme events, operating strategies, and well-maintained recovery plans. Special protection schemes are also being considered as a valuable tool to complement the operator actions and support grid recovery.
Service Offerings
Our most recent works include supporting clients with identifying the most vulnerable locations in their system, evaluating their impacts, classifying their criticality, supporting compliance audits, and developing mitigation strategies. Our works cover a spectrum of resiliency-driven analysis including wildfire risks, earthquake vulnerability, gas disruption scenarios, CIP-014-2 requirements (R1 & R2), extreme weather, and aging infrastructure. A combination of our in-house tools and commercial software enable analysis that is structured to address all attributes of the resiliency problem. A combination of heuristic analysis, deterministic verification, and probability assessments ensure all risk elements are considered.
Typical Service Offerings
- Developing a detailed grid resiliency program.
- Identifying of vulnerable bulk electric system facilities including substations and protection systems.
- Quantitatively and qualitatively assessing the risks associated with substation vulnerability classifications.
- Detailed modeling of gas-electric interdependencies and simulations of extreme events or scenarios.
- Modeling and design of special protection schemes.
- Performing probabilistic risk assessments to quantify the impact of aging infrastructure on system resiliency.
- Inspecting facility design and its potential risk to physical and cyber-attack.
- Identifying the equipment and components at the highest risk of attack from someone with knowledge of the electric system.
- Assessing the types of attacks that can be realistically contemplated at our client’s sites.
- Identifying potential mitigations of component risks and protection strategies.
- Providing insights into design and construction of appropriate facilities to address your physical security concerns.
Why Quanta Technology?
Quanta Technology has assembled an impressive team of industry experts in the areas of regulatory compliance, substation design and construction, protection and control, system planning, communications, and remediation/mitigation design to assess and provide solutions to grid vulnerability, including physical attacks on substations. Our team of seasoned professionals offers outstanding credentials and is among the most experienced in the industry. Quanta Technology has real-world, relative experience with numerous projects to manage aging infrastructure and asset hardening and has experience with physical security and wildfires.
Robust Solutions
Our risk assessment can be used by utilities to identify mitigation measures to address electric system vulnerabilities. Quanta Technology will work closely with its clients to identify the assets (i.e., substations, transmission lines, transformers, communications, system protection, gas infrastructure etc.) to be evaluated. We have extensive experience and tools to assist with identifying the criticality of not only the electric grid but the impacts of each of its components.
The time for planning grid resiliency is now, and Quanta Technology is ready with the expertise and experience to harden the infrastructure and strategize the recovery.