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Shifts in language fascinate me. When did “reach out to” replace “contact”? The battle for hearts and minds often involves subtle nuances in language but deep changes in meaning. “Medicare for all” connotes something far different from “government-run medical system.”

For the first few decades of my career in electricity, reliability was the paramount performance characteristic and metric for the industry. Over the last ten years, I sense that “reliability” is being replaced by “resiliency,” perhaps not in the back offices of utility management and engineering, but in public discourse.

A few years ago, I heard a presentation by a power plant engineer who made this distinction with a boxing analogy: Reliability is avoiding the punch, resiliency is taking the punch.

I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I sure have thought about it a great deal since, and especially now in the midst of this COVID19 global pandemic. 

There’s a subtle shift in meaning and design/operating philosophy implied here. The “grid” has always been over-built (gold-plated to some in other industries) to achieve very high reliability standards, to “always keep the lights on.” The goal was to avoid outages. This, one could say, is the core competency of a utility company. 

Resiliency means accepting that outages will occur, and perhaps also means that the next catastrophic event will unlikely resemble the last one. In other words, you can’t design for the worst flood that occurred in the last 100 years, because the next one will likely be worse. You also design so that the critical parts of the grid can “survive,” and the non-critical ones can “recover.”

So rather than avoiding an outage, you design the system so that you can bounce back from an outage as expeditiously as possible. And you divide the grid into two buckets – critical and non-critical.

To me, this subtle distinction actually represents a sweeping change in attitude and philosophy. Rather than striving to maintain the overall grid serving everyone to be as robust as possible, you are now conceding that outages are unavoidable and some areas served by the grid are less critical than others.

Another way of looking at it is that reliability is the outcome and resiliency is the means by which you achieve reliability. From a Microsoft webpage about cloud-based services comes this: “Resiliency is the ability…to withstand certain types of failure and yet remain functional from the customer perspective.”

For electricity, I interpret this to mean something like this: a site standby power system takes over immediately when a grid tie failure is detected. It could also mean that the electricity grid is designed to withstand the worst catastrophic event we can imagine; however, I doubt there is ever enough money in the budget for that.

The COVID19 pandemic is causing all manner of reflection and projection, as catastrophic events tend to. An article by an emergency room doctor I read this morning in The New Yorker asked, “Will we be forced to shift the emphasis of our bio-ethical values away from our “do everything” approach. “The American medical system is focused on aggressive healing at all costs, sometimes in the face of medical futility to the detriment of the patient’s comfort,” the article went on, “Emergency rooms are the country’s safety net.”

Does this imply a subtle shift from avoiding a death “at all costs” to “facing difficult decisions” about who has to die. The former means having the medical resources on hand, a gold-plated system, if you will, to avoid death. The latter means accepting that everything you can do for the patient is now less than it was. Avoiding the punch or taking the punch?

Somehow buried in this replacement of reliability by resiliency, I fear, is that gold-plated reliability for everyone will be replaced by an acceptable level of reliability for everyone. Above that and you’re on your own. I hope I am wrong.

It appears we’ve accepted a future in which catastrophic events get worse and more frequent, and there’s less we can do about that. That to me is different than the mentality which prevailed from WWII to recently in the electricity industry– a period during which we built the greatest and most reliable just-in-time inventory system, one gigantic machine delivering 24/7/365 to everyone an essential service, the backbone of the economy.

It may all seem like an esoteric discussion but shifts in language have consequences over time.