The Federal Energy Management Program’s (FEMP) Technical Resilience Navigator (TRN) helps organizations manage the risk to critical missions from disruptions in energy and water services. The TRN provides a systematic approach to identifying vulnerabilities and inefficiencies with a site’s energy and water systems, while prioritizing solutions that reduce risk. The TRN’s unique focus on energy and water disruptions is intended to integrate with broader emergency preparedness, energy and water management, sustainability, and security efforts, to strengthen the way those programs plan for energy and water resource availability. Completion of the TRN enables organizations to be proactive in identifying and addressing vulnerabilities to their critical energy and water systems resulting in optimized systems that reduce outage impacts, and support continuous mission operations which could result in cost and waste reduction.

Overview

The TRN offers a step-by-step risk-informed approach to energy and water resilience planning. Working through this process helps the site build a detailed understanding of plans, priorities, and baseline conditions related to energy and water systems, and what types of gaps might expose the site to risk. The ultimate outcome of the TRN is a set of actionable solutions that address a site’s most important gaps in resilience and enhance the ability to maintain critical missions in the case of a disruptive event (i.e. natural hazard or an unassociated third-party intervention).

The TRN’s focus on energy and water systems requires an understanding of critical loads and the site’s ability to sustain those loads through a disruptive event. In addition to reducing risk, the TRN helps sites to identify and integrate related organizational priorities, such as sustainability, energy efficiency and cyber security, into the assessments and prioritization of resilience solutions.

Users can move through the TRN modules sequentially to conduct step-wise resilience project planning or can review sections independently for targeted outcomes. This modular approach to resilience planning allows users to build an institutional foundation from which they can conduct assessments based on their user experience and organizational knowledge.

TRN Framework

The TRN breaks the resilience planning process into six broad sections called modules. Each module has several actions that lead users through information collection and specific analyses. Each TRN module contains: information that describes the goal of the module as a whole, the relevant actions within the module, the resources included in the module, and the outcomes of the module.

The TRN guides users through the key elements of the resilience planning process by identifying actions in each module to document and assess a site’s resilience posture. Actions in the TRN yield tables and checklists which help sites identify and track key aspects of their energy and water systems as they relate to their organizational resilience planning priorities.

While TRN actions are focused on the specific steps and documentation required to move through the resilience planning process, a list of associated resources is provided to allow interested users the opportunity to explore topics of interest in greater depth including FAQs to help guide the users through the process.

Though the TRN lays out a sequential path through the resilience planning process, resilience planning is an iterative exercise. Throughout each module, the TRN identifies information that must be mapped between modules. When appropriate, the user is prompted to review previously completed actions to overlay outcomes identified earlier in the TRN with the action that they are currently undertaking, enabling a broader perspective to achieving specific organizational objectives and priorities.

The TRN process ultimately results in the development of a list of risk-informed resilience-enhancing solutions that are prioritized based on the reduction of risk to a site’s critical loads, as well as other organizational and site priorities.