Recent natural event patterns suggest that extreme weather events are only increasing in intensity and frequency. Eight of the ten costliest hurricane seasons have been in the past 20 years — with four of these in just the past five years — and wildfires are burning more often and more destructively. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was the busiest on record, with 31 depressions, 30 storms and 13 hurricanes. Needless to say, resiliency is top of mind for many industries.
Fires in the West were devastating this year, with California suffering its worst year on record. The Midwest has also been inundated with ice storms throughout the year. The overlapping timing and geographic spread of these events, combined with unexpected operational disruptions caused by COVID-19, made 2020 a particularly challenging year to ensure power resiliency in the U.S.
With 1,800 managed microgrid systems across the country, PowerSecure provides clean, reliable and resilient power to customers for everyday operations and during unanticipated grid outages. This paper summarizes PowerSecure’s 2020 system resiliency performance across all of the year’s natural event-related outages.