Electric power is the most essential energy on a continuous basis for commercial and personal use. The centralized state owned nature of electric power has changed in the past decade, as many private power-plants and medium size power generators have entered the national electric power network. At the same time, exporting electric power to neighbor countries is a good source of government income.
Many risks always existed in the power industry, as the supply and demand are affected by many stochastic internal and external factors. The number and magnitude of technological, economic, social and environment changes in this industry are also accelerating. The power industry is faces with many uncertain dimensions, where other forms of energy come into play, such as oil and gas supplies.
Crisis is where the most drastic pressure is put on the industry. Natural and man-made disasters occur often which require a comprehensive command system to deal with them. Disasters must be prevented and mitigated ahead of time by passive defense strategies, and be managed as they occur by crisis management procedures. Implications and damages are kept to a minimum for business continuity.
In this paper, we review the background and the existing literature of power industry to identify the main factors and relationships. We use Iran case as a developing country with many sources of natural energies as well as an extensive network of electric power. A recent case of Earthquake is utilized to illustrate the magnitude of issues and shortcomings in the current system of crisis response in Iran.
We use future study approach to consider several scenarios of plausible future for power industries. We also utilize the standard ICS (Incident Command System) processes as the basis for systematic dealing with risks, uncertainties and crisis in electric power industries. Optimization and simulation models are sued then to evaluate and compare various strategies to respond to various circumstances.