Why energy resilience depends on resilient communications and vice versa

As the energy system becomes more digitalised, telecommunications is no longer supporting infrastructure but is now operational infrastructure, say Grid Scientific and FarrPoint experts.

Storm Arwen left nearly a million homes without power and disrupted thousands of mobile sites across all four networks. Telecoms losses then made it harder to coordinate repairs and keep customers informed, a reminder that restoring power increasingly depends on the very communications that a power outage takes down.

Digitalisation and flexibility

The growth of renewable generation, battery storage, electric vehicles, and other distributed energy resources means network operators need much greater visibility into what is happening across their networks.

Sensors, remote monitoring and automated control systems rely on telecommunications networks to provide the real-time data needed to dispatch flexibility, manage constraints, identify faults and make effective use of network capacity.

But flexibility is only as dependable as the communications that underpin it; dispatch signals must reliably reach large numbers of distributed assets, and operations need confirmation that those assets have responded. If communications fail during a system stress event, operators may lose access to flexibility that had been assumed available. In a highly flexible energy system, lost communications may be equivalent to lost network capacity.

Commercial connectivity and operational risk

Public mobile and fixed networks are designed to deliver high levels of service across large customer bases, but they are not engineered specifically to respond to the operational requirements of the energy system. Dependence on a single mobile operator, fibre provider or physical route can introduce single points of failure, while apparently diverse services may ultimately share the same ducts, exchanges, towers, transmission links or power supplies.

Power outages can affect mobile sites and fixed network equipment, making service duration dependent on the availability of battery or generator backup.

Network operators may lose access to real-time data from substations, sensors and other remote assets, reducing their ability to identify faults, monitor network conditions and remotely control equipment. Field teams may struggle to receive work instructions, access operational information, or communicate with control centres and other teams. The consequences can include longer restoration times, increased operational and safety risks, and greater disruption for energy customers.

Designing connectivity for energy resilience

This starts with understanding which applications, assets and operational processes depend on communications and how critical those dependencies are.

Organisations can then map the end-to-end communications that support them, including network providers, physical routes, shared infrastructure, power dependencies, and interfaces with third parties.

Operators need to define appropriate requirements for availability, recovery time and performance based on the operational consequences of losing each service. For the most critical functions, this may require genuinely diverse routes, alternative operators or technologies, independent power arrangements and tested fallback procedures.

A cyber incident can take out communications just as effectively as a storm, and fallback arrangements need to work in both cases. Resilience planning should therefore cover not only physical diversity and backup power, but also network segmentation, secure remote access, supplier assurance and the ability to operate safely in a degraded or isolated mode.

There is no single technology that can provide resilient communications for every energy application, location and operational scenario. Crucially, resilience should also be regularly tested and reviewed as networks, suppliers and operational requirements change.

Final thoughts

Energy organisations should treat connectivity as part of their critical operational infrastructure. A useful starting point is to ask three questions.

Which critical operations would be affected if a single communications service failed?
Do services that appear diverse share ducts, sites or power supplies?
Would flexibility you are counting on still be dispatched if a communications network went down?