LEARN / GLOSSARY
Resource adequacy
Whether a system holds enough resources to serve demand at an accepted level of risk. It is a probabilistic judgement rather than a threshold, and the accepted level of risk is itself a choice.
Definition
Resource adequacy asks whether the resources available to a system are sufficient to meet demand across the conditions the system is planned against. It is assessed through loss-of-load studies rather than by comparing two numbers, and the conventional criterion in North American planning is a loss-of-load expectation of one day in ten years.
Why the dictionary version is insufficient
Adequacy sounds like a pass or fail test against a fixed standard. It is a probability against a chosen tolerance. A system meeting one day in ten years is accepting an expected outage, and a different tolerance produces a different capacity requirement from identical physical conditions.
Institute analysisBecause the criterion is a policy choice expressed as a probability, adequacy assessments across regions can differ for reasons that have nothing to do with physical conditions. A firm comparing two regions should establish what risk tolerance each planning process assumed before treating their margins as comparable.
Why it matters for capacity
NERC reports that thirteen of twenty-three North American assessment areas face elevated or high resource adequacy risk over the next ten years, with planned resource additions failing to keep pace with demand growth and confirmed retirements. That assessment is the closest published answer to whether a region can serve new industrial load through the coming decade.
Related terms
Planning reserve margin · Effective load carrying capability · Firm power
Appears in
Why Supply Is Not Keeping Pace
Firm Power and Why It Matters
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