Communications Resilience: The Mission Critical Backbone of Utility Operations

As utilities become increasingly dependent on continuous grid operations—both during normal conditions and following disasters of growing frequency and severity—communications resilience has become mission critical. Communications outages can delay restoration, compromise safety, and hinder emergency response, making communications a mission critical backbone of modern grid operations.

This session explores communications resilience through the 3Rs—Reliability, Redundancy, and Restoration—positioning communications as the Fourth Pillar of utility resilience alongside generation, transmission, and distribution. Attendees will examine how the 3Rs support communications systems required to operate 24x7 and how these concepts can be clearly framed for leadership discussions.

The presentation addresses the challenge of enhancing coverage in remote and hard to reach service territories, featuring a real world Idaho Power case study. Operating across BLM and USFS lands, the utility deployed a private VSAT satellite network integrated with microwave and DMR.

Attendees will gain actionable insights and messaging strategies to support leadership level presentations of communications project concepts, architecture decisions, and status updates, reinforcing communications as a mission critical enabler of safety, situational awareness, and rapid grid restoration when failure is not an option.