Using Resilience as a Service to Improve Utility Funding for Outage Prevention

As severe weather events become more frequent and severe, the importance of grid hardening has become more apparent. However, finding the funding for necessary resiliency improvements is not always as clear.

In an article for Energy Central, Daniel Talero, research analyst with Guidehouse Insights, says an emerging business model, resilience as a service (RaaS), could be a way for utilities and their partners to recoup the costs of expensive investments.

Talero said RaaS has been piloted at the transmission and distribution level, but could also be expanded to include building retrofits, which would position a wide variety of energy management technologies as resilience investments in the commercial and industrial sector, as well as in the residential sector.

“Utilities stand to profit via RaaS and other low CAPEX models, as do vendors, by increasing availability and installer training—particularly in the resistance-heated US South,” Talero said. “Even better, the current economics of the RaaS approach stand to improve as the cold-weather performance, demand response capacity, and lifetime costs of heat pumps and other electrified technologies improve.”