Reliability and Resiliency:
How Co-ops Can Achieve Both, Affordably
Disaster-proofing your community doesn’t have to come at a premium price.
When it comes to disaster preparedness, many people assume reliability and resiliency mean the same thing. They don’t – and understanding the difference is critical for electric cooperatives.
The U.S. Department of Energy explains it this way: “Energy reliability is the ability of a power system to consistently deliver power to homes, buildings, and devices – even in the face of instability, uncontrolled events, cascading failures, or unanticipated loss of system components. Energy resilience is the ability…to withstand and rapidly recover from power outages and continue operating.”
In other words, reliability is what keeps the lights on every day. Resiliency is what ensures power is restored quickly when extraordinary events – hurricanes, wildfires, cyberattacks – occur. Your community needs both, and your co-op is expected to deliver both, often without large budgets.
Achieving reliability and resiliency may sound expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Your co-op can take practical steps now by combining local generation with smart technology, known as Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and a Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS).
DERs and DERMS: The Building Blocks of Resiliency
DERs are power assets located throughout your co-op’s territory, owned either by your members or by your co-op directly. They can be traditional assets like natural gas and diesel generators, battery energy storage, or renewable resources like solar and wind.
A DERMS is the technology that ties these resources together, providing visibility across the system and allowing your co-op to dispatch resources when needed. Advanced solutions go further, monitoring grid conditions in real time and triggering assets automatically when every minute counts. Some also track asset health remotely, so you know your DERs are ready before they’re called upon, when it matters the most.
Disaster-Proofing Your Community in Practice
How can your co-op put these building blocks to work in an affordable way? It helps to think about resiliency in levels.
Level one starts with the assets already in your community. Member-owned generators, batteries, and solar arrays can become part of your emergency response program. By signing up members and integrating their DERs into your system, you unlock capacity when the grid is strained.
Level two is adding your own generation or storage at strategic points in the distribution system. These assets strengthen local capacity during disasters, and they can also create everyday savings:
- Dispatch them to avoid peak charges when wholesale prices surge.
- Protect against price volatility with the ability to self-supply during high-cost periods.
The result is a system that not only supports members when the worst happens but also lowers day-to-day energy costs. Reliability and resiliency together become a shield for the community and a strategy for affordability.
Scale, Save, and Protect with the Right Energy Advisor
As severe weather events grow more frequent, the time to add resiliency is now. Whether your co-op is just beginning to plan or already has projects underway, the challenge is finding a way to strengthen your system in a manner that fits your community and your budget.
That’s where the right energy advisor makes the difference – bringing together not just generation assets but also advanced management technology, financing options, and the expertise to design an integrated approach.
Tangent Energy offers exactly that, with a full range of solutions: diesel and natural gas generator sets, microgrid solutions, battery energy storage systems, and a DERMS platform. It monitors energy prices, predicts peaks, dispatches resources automatically when costs surge or emergencies arise, and provides real-time performance reporting. Across the country, Tangent Energy is already helping co-ops and other customers achieve resiliency while delivering energy savings of up to 20%.
The next storm will come. With the right approach – and the right advisor – your co-op can weather it confidently, keeping members safe and energy costs under control.
Tom Hammond
Energy Technology Engineering Manager
Tom is an energy technology engineering manager with expertise in the dispatch and monitoring of generation assets throughout various U.S. energy markets (ISOs/RTOs).
At Tangent, Tom has been integral in the design and implementation of all metering, communications and control architecture associated with the remote dispatch of assets via the Tangent Active Management Platform (AMP). His responsibilities include communications design, coordinating installations, and overseeing final system commissioning and testing.
Tom was also instrumental in developing and expanding the Network Operations Center (NOC) at Tangent and plays a key role integrating the monitoring and control systems for a all assets under Tangent management.
Tom has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University.