Explore What Happens When Utilities Go Dark
“Black-Start” Exercises (BSEs) are designed to test the ability of organizations, facilities, and installations to operate through major power or utility outages. Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) has a diverse and deep bench of analysts and engineering experts experienced in planning and conducting successful systems outage and recovery exercises.
Background
- BSEs are comprehensive operations and preparedness exercises that evaluate the intersection of plans and infrastructure. BSEs effectively evaluate preparedness through an extended commercial utility loss and can be customized to mitigate impacts to sensitive equipment.
- BSEs can be designed to evaluate the impact of natural disasters, accidents, and malicious events such as cybersecurity breaches. BSEs can also integrate with other exercise requirements across the emergency management and operations continuity spectrum, such as active shooter scenarios.
- With extensive risk management planning, BSEs are designed to be safe, risk-mitigated exercises that evaluate potential vulnerabilities and resilience postures, with the security of quick utility restoration. BSEs do not inherently introduce additional risk; organizations are accepting the risks of utility outages every day–a BSE simply identifies those risks and potential vulnerabilities so that organizations can appropriately mitigate them.
Experience
- CTC is an independent, nonprofit, applied scientific research and development professional
services organization.
- CTC has vast federal and particularly Department of Defense experience in energy and water security, cybersecurity, utility infrastructure condition assessments, mission thread analysis, and exercise design and execution.
- Our approach ensures compliance with guidance and operational requirements while designing comprehensive exercises that center on stakeholder and risk management for robust solutions. Findings from our exercise services have resulted in policy and planning changes, procedural shifts, and infrastructure investments for improved resilience to utility disruptions.
Strategy
- Test the ability of the backup systems to start, transfer load, and carry load until
commercial power is restored.
- Align stakeholders on critical energy requirements to meet mission requirements.
- Validate mission operations plans.
- Identify mission interdependencies.
- Verify backup electric power system performance.
Concurrent Technologies Corporation’s ProteCTC™ program integrates a wide range
of best-in-class protection and resilience solutions to identify, prioritize, and
protect your critical infrastructure through an integrated business and technical
approach.
CTC’s SOAR Test and Exercise Services
- Estimated 6-8 month period of performance (POP).
- Exercise conducted ~6-8 weeks prior to the POP end.
- Prior leadership engagement and quick data submission can shorten the POP.
- Government delays reviewing planning documents can extend the POP.
- Exercise scope includes:
- Stakeholder Management & Requirements Interviews
- Data & Plan Reviews
- Systems & Infrastructure Mapping and Assessment
- Risk Assessment & Management
- Exercise Design & Planning
- Exercise Facilitation & Execution
- After-Action Report & Solutions Recommendations
