Called “the rock that burns” by Aristotle, coal was the first major industrial fuel, created about 300 million years ago as heat and pressure compressed pools of decaying plant matter. Burned to generate heat to boil water and make steam to move a piston in a Watt “fire engine” or a giant turbine in a modern power station, the industrialization of manufacturing, transportation, and electric power is examined from beginnings in the United Kingdom to today’s increased use of coal combustion in developing countries despite the limited thermal efficiency and harmful combustion by-products.

A transition simplifies or improves the efficiency of old ways, turning intellect into industry with increased capital – when both transpire, change becomes unstoppable. The transition to a more efficient combustion fuel changed the global economy when coal replaced wood (twice as efficient) and oil replaced coal (roughly twice as efficient again). The history of the Industrial Revolution is explained through the energy content of different fuels (wood, peat, coal) from the 1800s, early steam engines that produced power for manufacturing and propulsion, and the political, economic, and social consequences of industrialization (wealth, health, and globalization), culminating in Thomas Edison’s 1882, coal-fired, electricity-generating, power station in Lower Manhattan.

There is much to do to create a modern energy paradigm, one that is clean, sustainable, and economically viable, but the changes are coming as overall efficiencies improve and manufacturing costs decrease for today’s renewable technologies. In 2000, 0.6% of total global energy production was generated either by wind or solar, a 50% increase in a decade; by 2010, the amount had doubled.1 By 2013, Spain had achieved a global first as wind-generated power became its main source of energy (21% of total demand, enough to run 7 million homes2), while both Portugal and Denmark now regularly produce days powered 100% by wind.

Historically cloudy England scored a first, as solar became the largest source of grid energy during an especially sunny 2018 spring bank-holiday weekend,3 while in the midst of high winds from Storm Bella on Boxing Day in 2020, the UK was more than half powered by wind, a new record.

Photovoltaic solar power is examined from the atomic level up, starting with solid-state electronics, elemental crystals, and semiconductors. The preferential doping of silicon and germanium to make p-n junctions, transistors, and solar batteries is explained along with the growth of the PV industry that has seen solar panel prices drop and uptake increase exponentially over the past 4 decades according to Swanson’s Law (a solar equivalent of Moore’s Law). The manufacturing of the modern solar cell, behind-the-meter installations (residential and commercial solar), and utility-scale solar are all discussed.

The growth of the solar industry is traced from the beginning of the Space Age in 1957 to the first solar farm in 1982 in the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles that generated 1 megawatt in a single location for the first time and the current record-breaking solar farms across the globe (India’s 2.2-GW Bhadla Solar Park is currently the largest). The latest developments in thin-film solar cells, building-integrated PV, and floating solar are discussed, concentrated solar power is explained (power tower and parabolic trough), and the advantages and disadvantages of utility-scale PV versus CSP examined. Home installation calculations, panel requirements, local insolation data, and tips to maximize output are given.

This chapter initially explains how dependencies are established when at least a part of an infrastructure system requires the provision of the service to function. Although the focus is on functional dependencies, this chapter also explores physical and conditional dependencies. Resilience metrics presented in previous chapters are broadened in order to represent the effect of dependencies on resilience levels. Dependencies established within an infrastructure system are also explained. The concept of buffer as a local storage of the resources related to the depending service is defined as part of these expanded metrics, and then it is exemplified by examining a practical application of such buffers: power plants for information and communication network (ICN) sites. After introducing the main concepts and ideas related to dependencies, this chapter takes a broader view by discussing interdependencies when those are established both directly and indirectly. The study of interdependencies for electric power grids and ICN also explores the relationship with other infrastructures, such as transportation networks and water distribution systems, and with community social systems.

The increased interest that the topic of critical infrastructure resilience is attracting in academia, government, commerce, services, and industry is creating an alternative engineering field that could be called resilience engineering. However, the views of the meaning of resilience have varied, and even in some very relevant world languages, an exact translation of the word “resilience” has only recently been introduced – for example, the word “resiliencia” was added to the dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language in 2014 – or it still does not exist, as happens in Japanese. Thus, this chapter introduces the main concepts associated with the study of resilience engineering applicable to critical infrastructure systems with a focus on electric power grids and information and communication networks (ICNs) because these are the infrastructures that are identified as “uniquely critical” in US Presidential Policy Directive 21, which is the source for the definition of resilience that is used in this book.

Although today’s power grids have their own sensing and control communications infrastructure in dedicated networks operating separate from the publicly used information and communication networks (ICNs), technological advances may lead to more integrated electric power and ICN infrastructures. Some of the motivating technological changes that may act as catalysts for such increased integration of both infrastructures include the need for much higher power supply resilience for ICN sites, development of an “Internet of Things,” and the increased communication needs for electric power devices at users’ homes or at the power distribution level of the grid as part of power systems’ evolution into “smarter” grids. Hence, this chapter explores the implications in terms of resilience of integrated electric power and ICN infrastructures. In particular, the use of integrated power management to facilitate the use of renewable energy sources is discussed. Fundamental concepts about cybersecurity are also presented.

As was introduced in Chapter 1, adaptation is a fundamental attribute of resilient systems. Adaptation could occur by identifying changes in the physical and social environment with the potential to affect a community system operation or by reacting after a disruptive event happens. Part of a positive reaction in the latter of these adaptation mechanisms involves learning about which factors contributed to improving resilience and which factors caused a lower resilience. This chapter focuses on an important tool that is part of such a learning process for improved resilience: disaster forensics. Disaster forensics are based on a postdisaster investigation, in which field investigations and postevent data collection are important components. Hence, the first part of this chapter will focus on explaining the steps and procedures involved with a disaster forensic investigation, including a description of how to perform field investigations. This chapter then describes power grids’ and information and communication networks’ performance in recent natural disasters based on lessons obtained during past forensic investigations.

This chapter is dedicated to examining technologies and strategies for improved resilience of information and communications networks. Initially, this chapter describes typical service requirements for information and communications networks by discussing services provision expectations. These expectations are presented in context by describing typical regulatory environments observed in the United States and other countries, placing special attention on emergency 911 regulations. The second part of this chapter provides an overview of most commonly observed strategies and technologies used to improve resilience. These strategies and technologies include resources management approaches, as well as hardware- and software-based technologies.

This chapter provides an overview of the main infrastructure systems that are the focus of this book as well as describing fundamental concepts and information about network theory, reliability and availability, and disruptive events that are also applicable to the rest of this book.