Editor’s Note: This guest blog post was written by Don Hanlon, Technology Products Manager, in conjunction with Preparedness Month that occurs every September. ORAU is focused on offering experience and capabilities in preparedness planning.
Resilience. It is of paramount importance for the United States’ energy sector. How well can our energy systems absorb shock from natural disasters, cybersecurity breeches, equipment failures or high energy demands from summer heat or winter cold? How quickly can essential power services be restored after such events? How can the reliability of our energy systems be enhanced to avoid long-duration outages?
These are the questions and challenges that the U.S. Department of Energy and energy corporations around the country are regularly grappling with. Their goals are to make the power grid more flexible, to increase renewable energy sources, to avoid outages and to recover quickly when they occur. To that end, companies are increasing their use of emergency drills and exercises to test their resilience. That is where ORAU can help, recently launching its newest application, Exercise Builder Energy (EBE).
Based on the success of ORAU’s long-running Exercise Builder Nuclear application for the nuclear power industry, Xcel Energy reached out and asked us to develop EBE. Xcel Energy is one of the largest power-producing corporations in the U.S., offering nearly every type of energy source including oil, natural gas and nuclear, as well as renewable sources such as hydro, wind, solar, and geothermal.
Rancho Seco nuclear generating station in Herald, CA
The primary purpose of the Exercise Builder Energy system is to organize the data required for each emergency drill and exercise. The application records the facilities that are involved, the people who will participate, the hazards to be tested, the exercise objectives, the emergency scenario(s), a timeline of events and more. Exercise planners can then generate various types of documents from EBE, such as exercise plans, participant rosters, event timelines and ad hoc sections like weather information. After the exercise is complete, its performance by the participants is evaluated in multiple ways, and these results are also recorded in EBE. Again, the evaluation data can be output into multiple report formats to be submitted to managers or any regulatory agencies.
Importantly, the value of EBE for a client corporation increases steadily over time as data is compiled over years. Clients can then utilize metrics, conduct trend analyses, identify chronic problem areas in their resilience and take advantage of lessons learned. EBE helps them establish consistency in approach throughout their exercise programs and increases the efficiency for developing and managing drills and exercises. As we have seen with other ORAU applications, these capabilities will evolve over time as we learn more about the needs of the energy companies and react to changes in technology, infrastructure and user requirements.
The hope is that with EBE we can build a large client base whose members support each other much as we’ve seen with the Exercise Builder Nuclear application. That community enjoys an annual in-person meeting at ORAU in Oak Ridge, Tenn., attended by representatives from each client company, as well as monthly meetings to see demos of new features and discuss goals and issues.
Want to learn more about EBE Energy? Be sure to check out the official Exercise Builder Energy webpage for more information!