Hurricane Katrina taught federal, state, and local public managers extensive lessons about the criticality of electricity reliability in a disaster. In the report, The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned, the White House conceded that, Hurricane Katrina had a significant impact on many sectors of the regions critical infrastructure, especially the energy sector. However, the first lines of this concession focused on the shutdown and disruption of crude oil and natural gas recovery in the Gulf of Mexico and the shutdown of 11 petroleum refineries, or one-sixth of the nations refining capacity, in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Only later in the paragraph does the report turn to the 2.5 million customers who suffered power outages across a 90,000 square mile area in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Homes, businesses, and federal, state, and local agencies had intermittent or no electricity. There was no light at night; no air conditioning; no refrigeration of food, essential medical supplies, and equipment; and no computers, radios, televisions, or other communication devices powered by electricity.

According to an ICF International (www.icfi.com) report, by October 2005, an estimated 2.2 million people had registered for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) aid, and 416,852 people were still without power in Louisiana, Texas, and parts of Mississippi. The irony was that energy-producing states were without energy or power for nearly six weeks.

Electricity disruption had a macabre connection to other parts of the disaster. The absence of lights at night encouraged predatory crime. The oppressive summer heat was unmerciful to those with chronic respiratory illnesses and to children and the elderly. Those providing emergency medical assistance could not access vaccines, antibiotics, or other medicines that needed to be stored in refrigerators or electrically operated security storage. The lack of street lights made walking, swimming, navigating, or driving nearly impossible. Food could not be stored or cooked in large quantities.

The Entergy Corporation, an integrated utility that distributes electricity to 2.7 million residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and natural gas to 184,000 customers in Louisiana, suffered significant damage to its more than 15,500 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 1,550 transmission substations. This was as a result of the hurricane, the flooding aftermath, and the destruction of the capacity of customers to pay bills. The company went bankrupt and only recently emerged as a restructured utility.

Recovery and Electricity

Since 2006, massive efforts to rebuild homes, businesses, and industries include a reconsideration of the role of electrical infrastructure. As the ICF report indicates, In the 140 years since the Civil War, the Gulf Coast region was populated with about 2 million single-family homes that, by 2000, cost an average of $71,685, nearly $48,000 less than the average single-family home in America.

These homes were not only cheaper, but typically more than 30 years old. Energy efficiency in these homes was among the lowest in the United States. FEMA indicates that 310,353 new single-family homes are needed in the Gulf Region because 241,524 were destroyed in Louisiana, 68,466 in Mississippi, and 363 in Alabama. Moreover, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys (EPAs) ENERGY STAR program extends building code requirements for new home construction to meet rigorous energy efficiency guidelines.

Homes in the post-Katrina Gulf Coasttrailers, renovated structures, or new buildingsrequire electricity for cooking, air conditioning and heating, refrigeration, lighting, and the operation of basic household appliances. Communities rely on electricity for street lighting, signage, semaphores, water pumps, and a variety of storage facilities. Businesses require electricity not only for lighting, but also for computers, office equipment, a variety of machines, and advertising.

According to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Power and telecommunications outages can disrupt all electronic forms of payments, including debit and credit card payments. Customers and employers remaining in, or evacuating from, flooded or damaged neighborhoods, central business districts, industrial parks, and rural areas often require substantial amounts of cash to pay for critical goods and services, particularly if they cannot return to their homes and businesses.

Conventional Electricity Distribution

I refer to conventional energy generation and distribution in the Gulf Region as a single flower model of electric power. More than 90 percent of the electric power distributed to homes, businesses, industries, and transportation comes from generators owned by a

single company.

The electric power infrastructure serving Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama during and after Hurricane Katrina broke down during the natural disaster. Commercial power depended upon coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel sources. Ironically, hydropower is used significantly less than fossil and nuclear fuel sources combined. Fuel was damaged by water. Rail and road deliveries of fuel to generate plants were disrupted.

The Entergy Corporation was at the center of a kind of complex electricity federalism in which federal law requires investor-owned electricity companies to file a proposal or a progress report on how they would create or join a Regional Transmission Organization (RTO). The RTO acted as an umbrella organization by bringing all utility transmission systems within a region under common control.

The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) was created in 2003 as a RTO approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It serves 4 million customers in all or parts of eight states, including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Alabama belongs to another RTO, SeTrans. RTOs are essential to the web of electricity reliability but they back up single flower electricity generation.

However, decisions about generation needs, transmission and distribution lines, fuel source, and how the RTO members would respond to customer need and demands are made as much in the RTO as by individual utilities and their state regulatory agencies. The bottom line in electricity is the goal of reliable electricity service to customers.

Reliability includes both adequacy and security. Adequacy is the continuing ability of the electric system to supply customer requirements at all times and at reasonable rates. Security is the ability of the electric system to endure sudden disturbances, whether technical, financial, or at the onset of a natural disaster. Both reliability and security were compromised by Hurricane Katrina.

The challenge is to assure reliability and security as the electricity generation, transmission, and distribution system is redesigned. Fortunately, public, private, and community-based initiatives are moving the Gulf Region from a single flower to a Garden Model of electricity generation and distribution. The garden includes multiple sources of fuel, including solar, wind, hydro, and other renewable optionsas depicted in Figure 1.

The Renewable Energy Equation

Although small in scale, various renewable energy strategies are redesigning the electricity infrastructure in states that are at risk for hurricanes. Smaller in scale, potentially more resilient in a storm, and accessible to a variety of communities and businesses, these green reconstruction strategies are part of the mitigation, preparedness, and response phases of emergency management. As instruments of mitigation, solar photovoltaic units are portable and can build electrical storage capacity needed for emergency and backup electricity generation.

Individual units powering street lights and signage can be more readily replaced than electric power substations or even damaged transmission lines connected to damaged generation systems. Solar contributions to battery storage help to address radio system disruptions that result from power outages, tower failures, and system interconnect failures.

The solar technology is now reaching beyond the 24 to 48 hours of outage capability to nearly one-week. This allows time for conventional facilities to be repaired and restored. Renewable electricity generation can be configured to backup or even replace convention electrical systems. Once hurricanes and flood surges end, the sun comes out and the wind blows gently again.

The Obama Strategy

In April 2009, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Many provisions of this statute support an integrated renewable energy strategy for emergency management. As Figure 2 indicates, the ARRA includes key emergency management provisions.

Community disaster loans, transit and rail security grants, and the port security grants provide funding for not only disaster recovery, but also reconstruction. Reconstruction includes opportunities to redesign homes, businesses, transit, street lights, and port facilities with both more energy-efficient components and equipment, solar photovoltaic, and other renewable energy equipment.

The administration strategy also addresses the inevitable question: How will the electricity infrastructure makeover be financed? Initial federal investments, combined with state and local public, corporate, and community initiatives, will finance much of the new garden electricity model.

However, these investments yield returns in the form of reduced and avoided utility costs, reduced demand for fossil fuel, and an expanded participation in electricity generation by hospitals, schools, factories, and other institutions with generators.

Another return-on-investment for this strategy is the reliability, security, and resiliency of telecommunications, medical, transport, law enforcement, and educational systems. Electricity is central to all of these systems. Moving from passive consumers of electricity, the garden model invites these systems to contribute to electricity production and management.

Using the 204 provisions of the 1978 Public Utility Act and provisions of the new energy statute recently signed by President Obama, hospitals, universities, factors, and other institutions with excess electricity capacity can contribute to the electricity grid.

These contributions build the capability the electricity network beyond the conventional single flower model. Combined with energy efficiency strategies provided for in other parts of the 2009 ARRA, electricity-contributing institutions can reinforce the connection between electricity reliability and security and emergency management.

Elements of an Electricity-Emergency Management Strategy

An electricity-emergency management strategy involves rebuilding electricity infrastructure by diversifying supply and constructing smaller, community- and small business-managed units that will reduce risk of supply disruption, expand response capability, and expedite both mitigation and recovery. Another element is to include a reconsideration of electricity federalism by assessing grid risk and capacity by hurricane zone rather than by state, and balancing federal, state, local, and community roles.

Other elements of the strategy should include encouraging small power supply and production and collaboration between conventional and alternative supply and recasting risk in electricity reliability terms. More important, this sort of strategy can use economic recovery as an opportunity to redesign the electric generation or distribution system in garden terms.