Some utilities have been in the headlines for the wrong reasons: The 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leak, 2018 Camp Fire in 2018, and 2021 Dominion Pipeline ransomware cyberattack. What should utilities do to mitigate such risks while balancing safety, reliability, and costs?
The California Public Utility Commission in concert with California’s investor-owned utilities use a framework to guide these decisions. They use Risk-Spend Efficiency (RSE) as a metric to prioritize those mitigations that do the most to reduce risk per dollar invested. We will describe how this scheme works and illustrate its use in ANAGRAM (Analytica for Natural Gas Risk Analysis and Management), software used to assess portfolios of risk mitigation projects for gas pipeline lines.