| Resource Type | Guide |
| Author / Source | Levite, Phillips, Carlson, and Prindle (ICF Consulting with contributions from Illume Advising, National Building Institute, and PNNL) |
| Publication Date | March 2023 |
| Location | United States |
| Initiative Type | Program, Partnership, Technology |
| Project Complexity | Intermediate |
| Recommended For | Board, Staff, Community Organizations |
Estimated reading time: 30+ minutes
Why This Matters for Rural Electric Co-ops
This guide is written for community and local-government leaders rather than co-ops, but it consistently frames energy resilience as something communities build in partnership with their electric utility. It walks non-experts through planning for extended power outages, including identifying who is most at risk, assessing local hazards, and choosing solutions from backup power to resilience hubs to microgrids. For a co-op, it is a window into how the communities it serves will think about and plan for resilience.
A co-op can use it to position itself as the partner on the pieces that need the utility, from backup power at critical facilities to outage communication for at-risk members. It works best as a common starting point between a co-op and the local governments and community organizations it serves.
Key Takeaways
| › | The guide organizes resilience into four stages (withstand, adapt, recover, and advance), giving a co-op and community a shared frame for scoping what they are planning for. |
| › | When a community cannot protect everything at once, the guide helps it rank which facilities to back up first by weighing how essential each one is against how difficult it is to power. This is a method a co-op can borrow for its own decisions. |
| › | Its solution menu spans energy efficiency, backup generation, solar-plus-storage, and microgrids, scalable to a community's resources. |
| › | Community resilience hubs (central buildings with backup power for residents during outages) work best on a utility-prioritized circuit, one of the clearest places for a co-op to plug in. |
Implementation Considerations
- Regulatory or Governance Considerations: Most action items sit with local governments (building codes, resilience-hub siting, funding), not the co-op. The co-op's role is as partner, so the value depends on local-government and community-organization engagement.
- Staffing or Technology Requirements: The co-op-facing pieces (priority circuits, critical-facility backup, resilience-hub power) draw on existing utility capabilities. Larger solutions like community microgrids are engineering-intensive and would need dedicated planning and capital.
- Time-Sensitive Information: The 2023 guide references federal funding programs, including Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax credits and FEMA hazard-mitigation grants, whose availability has since changed. Confirm current program status before relying on any funding pathway.
Notable Examples
- Community Lighthouse Project (New Orleans): A network of solar-and-battery resilience hubs at community centers and churches, a replicable model for a co-op-supported hub network.
- New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA): Pilots solar-plus-storage backup at senior buildings to keep critical systems like elevators and cooling running during outages.
Estimated reading time: 30+ minutes
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