2027 Event Agenda

Distribution reliability and resilience reporting is at an inflection point. Traditional service interruption indices are not enough to quantify gray-sky and high-impact events, the customer-level impacts of automation, DER-enabled restoration, microgrids, energy storage, or intentional de-energization for wildfire mitigation.

This panel session will bring together electric utility and standards leaders from ComEd, National Grid, the Oregon Public Utility Commission, the IEEE PES Distribution Resiliency Working Group, the IEEE PES Distribution Reliability Working Group, and the IEEE PES Transmission and Distribution Committee to discuss two active industry standard priorities: 1) the new Guide for the Definition of Resiliency and Measuring the Resiliency of the Electrical Distribution System and 2) the ongoing update of IEEE Std. 1366-2022, the IEEE Guide for Electric Power Distribution Reliability Indices, a key industry standard widely used in the U.S. and around the world by electric utilities and regulators to quantify distribution reliability performance.

Panelists will explain the Guide’s technical structure, including comparative resiliency metrics, Gray Sky Day metrics, the System Interruption Reduction Index, Restoration Effectiveness, Restoration Effectiveness Plus Area Index Resiliency (REPAIR), assets-at-risk approaches, and outage/restore curves. Utility panelists will show how these concepts are being applied in U.S. distribution systems to benchmark storm performance, evaluate automation and hardening, and support resilience investment decisions.

The second half of the panel session will focus on the IEEE 1366-2022 update: how reliability calculations should address distributed generation, behind-the-meter and utility-scale energy storage, microgrids, FLISR and automation, customer-level AMI/OMS data, catastrophic events, and Public Safety Power Shutoffs. The panel will tackle unresolved reporting questions: What counts as an interruption when DER serves load during a grid outage? How should reliability credit be assigned for energy storage and microgrids? Should Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) be treated as planned interruptions, excluded, or separately indexed in reliability calculations?

Attendees will leave with greater understanding of ongoing industry initiatives in this area, and a practical roadmap for aligning utility planning, operations, regulatory reporting, and standards development around technically defensible distribution resilience and reliability metrics.