March 25, 2025, 11:00-12:00 CST
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Dr. Stockton leads Paul N Stockton LLC, a strategic advisory firm in Santa Fe, NM. He helps private sector and government leaders strengthen the resilience of US infrastructure. He also chairs the Homeland Defense and Defense Support to Civil Authorities subcommittee of DOD’s Reserve Forces Policy Board, and chairs the Grid Resilience for National Security subcommittee of DOE’s Electricity Advisory Committee.
As Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs from 2009-2013, Dr. Stockton led the development of DOD’s Strategy for Mission Assurance and other resilience initiatives. After leaving office, Dr. Stockton pioneered the analysis of how grid reliability differs from resilience, and established black sky events as a new priority for preparedness initiatives. His recent studies on infrastructure resilience include Resilience for Grid Security Emergencies: Opportunities for Industry-Government Collaboration, Strengthening the Cyber Resilience of the North American Energy Systems, and Securing the Grid from Supply-Chain Based Attacks.
Dr. Stockton holds a PhD from Harvard University and a BA from Dartmouth College. He was twice awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, DOD’s highest civilian award. DHS also awarded Dr. Stockton its Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Dr. Stockton is a Senior Fellow of the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. He also chairs the board of Directors of Analytic Services, Inc, and serves on advisory committees for the Idaho National Laboratory.
Speaker presentation
Decentralizing the North American Power Grid for Resilience and Security
Deployments of solar and wind-based distributed energy resources (DERs) are rapidly decentralizing power generation in Canada and the US (and to a lesser extent, Mexico). Surging battery capabilities help grid operators manage the intermittence of such generation and respond to electric system instabilities. In addition, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), a deluge of energy aggregators and other non-utility startups are now gathering and controlling the flow of power from DERs.
The dispersal of generation, batteries, and control systems can enable North America to shift to a more resilient grid architecture. By exponentially growing the number of targets that adversaries must disrupt to black out the electric system, we can greatly complicate their attack planning and execution. Over time, we may also be able to exploit the “grid-forming” capabilities of advanced batteries to help restart the grid if outages occur and accelerate the restoration of power to hospitals, military bases, and other priority loads.