Sandia releases new report on social burden applications with utility partners

Sandia, working with Southern California Edison and the California Public Utilities Commission, is evaluating how electric utilities can use equity and resilience metrics to help inform resilience-driven infrastructure investments for climate adaptation.

Sandia’s newest report, Integration of Equitable Resilience Metrics into Climate-Informed Electric Utility Planning Processes, Phase One, evaluated Social Burden, an equitable resilience metric that measures the potential impact to people in accessing nonelectric critical services during electric system disruptions and estimates community resilience to these disruptions.

The use of Social Burden metrics extends insights utilities have into the communities and customers they serve. Social Burden can help planners understand the impacts of alternative disruption scenarios, the value of different interventions, and how the impact and value of interventions may differ across the landscape. Social Burden extends the definition of resilience from the facility to the community level.

Using the Social Burden framework can give electric utilities and public utility commissions a common language to work with local jurisdictions and other nonelectric infrastructure owners and operators to wholistically improve community resilience outcomes through investments and interventions. Additionally, the Social Burden framework provides space for community input into the definition of vulnerabilities and critical services, giving customers a way to directly influence the metrics used to measure outage impacts and inform resilience investments.

Read more about the Resilient Node Cluster Analysis Tool that enabled this work.