Resilience and Safety for Electric Co-Ops

“One of my favorite topics is disaster resilience. We do quite a bit of work on what mutual assistance looks like and how to improve mutual assistance, how to rebuild systems once they've been hit by something terrible. My more recent interesting example was when a tornado had gone through a co-op and they were looking for what to do when their data server was just plain missing. It was Dorothy essentially over to somewhere else and they were asking us: Is it a data breach?” 

- Emma Stewart  

For today's episode, I'm joined by Emma Stewart, Ph.D., Chief Scientist at the  National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA). Electric coops are local, member-owned providers of affordable, reliable power. We discuss Dr. Stewart’s work supporting these co-ops in research, incident response, and managing the growing threat of ransomware attacks. What role do these electric co-ops play in our national energy supply? What core challenges do they have in staying resilient? Join us to learn more.