Energy & utilities
Learn how to build a clear, defensible case for digital resilience investment amid rising cyber exposure, system complexity, and regulatory demands.
Energy leaders rarely disagree on the importance of resilience. Extreme weather, decentralisation, cyber exposure, and regulatory pressure make the case undeniable.
The question most electricity companies now face is not whether to invest, but where exactly and how to align the organisation behind the right priorities.
That alignment turns out to be the harder problem and it's becoming more urgent. Europe's electricity grid is already among the most reliable in the world, with an average outage duration of around 54 minutes per customer per year. But that performance is under growing pressure.
The CrowdStrike incident in 2024, where a single defective software update rippled across industries globally, illustrated a newer class of risk – digital dependencies that nobody had fully mapped, let alone stress-tested. Critical reliance on overseas hyperscalers, concentrated vendor relationships, and unaudited software supply chains now sit alongside storms and grid faults as genuine operational threats.
This is where digital resilience shifts from being important to being essential. The tools that give operators real-time visibility into infrastructure condition, early warning of system stress, and faster recovery from outages are, increasingly, digital ones. Yet digital resilience investments routinely stall. Proposals arrive on a board's desk framed as isolated IT upgrades. Risk assessments are siloed. The return on investment feels distant and hypothetical.
To move forward, organisations need a way to connect energy resilience outcomes with targeted digital investment decisions in a way that is measurable, prioritised, and actionable. This is where a structured resilience model becomes valuable.
“An investment in resilience is not an investment in making sure nothing ever happens. It is an investment in building the capabilities that limit how far you fall and how fast you recover.”
An effective tool for shifting the digital investment conversation is a structured resilience model. Specifically, what practitioners call the resilience curve.
The curve describes how a system performs over time when disruption occurs. It moves through distinct phases:
To see how this plays out in practice, consider what each phase looks like for a grid operator facing a physical infrastructure issue. Swissgrid, Switzerland's transmission system operator, documents this process in detail in their account of moving from manual inspections to autonomous drone flights. In the inspection process, the objective is to detect early signs of asset deterioration. The component hasn't failed yet, but it's heading that way. What happens next depends entirely on how quickly the problem is identified, escalated, and resolved.
Inspection results must be transmitted and damage assessed. Drone‑based inspections can often be carried out while the line remains in operation, and early detection may even help avoid later outages.
Drone-based inspection doesn't eliminate the risk of component failure. What it does is compress the timeline at both ends. Problems are identified earlier and with greater precision than ground inspections allow, reducing the number of issues that escalate into unplanned outages. This is the robustness phase. When a fault is found, the team already has high-resolution imagery, location data, and condition history, so diagnosis and dispatch are faster. That’s recovery. The same investment strengthens two phases of the curve simultaneously.
“Resilience means reducing uncertainty by using reliable information to make timely, better decisions. This is where drone-based inspections add value - providing earlier, more reliable insights into asset condition.”
A common mistake is to focus all resilience investment on robustness and treat it as the only goal, to assume that if you monitor and prevent hard enough, the curve never drops. But that's rarely achievable, and it's often not even the right target.
The more useful question is: which capabilities, if strengthened, give us the best outcome across a range of realistic scenarios? For Swissgrid, the answer wasn't just ‘inspect more’. It was ‘get better data, faster, so the whole response chain improves’.
Learn more about Swissgrid’s use of autonomous drones to strengthen resilience
What is the critical function your organisation must preserve, in measurable terms? For a DSO, this might be energy supply continuity for critical infrastructure customers, expressed as a maximum acceptable SAIDI score. The answer cannot be 'everything'. If it is, the investment case cannot be quantified and the conversation will go nowhere.
“Every grid operator will tell you that security of supply is non-negotiable. But non-negotiable doesn't mean unlimited CapEx. The organisations that invest well in resilience are the ones who've been honest about that constraint and built their strategy around it.”
The energy sector faces a decade of significant investment in grid resilience. The organisations that navigate it best will not be those with the largest budgets, they will be those who have built internal alignment around a clear answer to a simple question: what, precisely, are we trying to preserve, and what will it cost us if we fail?
The resilience curve provides a shared language for that conversation. It connects operational risk to investment decision-making in a way that is tangible enough to act on.
If your organisation is working through the resilience questions we have discussed today – mapping vulnerabilities, making the case for digital investment, or evaluating which technologies to prioritise – don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.
At Zühlke, we know how to maximise the return on investment in digital resilience and can help you select and implement the right technology in the right place.
