SSF Resilient Energy Certificate Program › Energy Systems and Enterprise Resilience
Course
Energy Systems and Enterprise Resilience
Recorded and self-paced. Watch on your own schedule
Available Friday, January 29, 2027
About eight hours of recorded instruction
Includes the Energy Basics 101 recording, available as soon as you register
Awards the SSF Certificate of Completion
Counts toward the SSF Resilient Energy Certificate and the Comprehensive Certificate
Taught by Joseph Fiksel, Ph.D.
Author of Resilient by Design; former Vice President for Life Cycle Management at Battelle; co-founder of the Center for Resilience and the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University
Register by January 15, 2027 $495
Join a live Q&A session with Joseph.
Everyone who registers by January 15 is invited to a live online session with Joseph in February. Bring the resilience questions from your own organization and work through them with the author of Resilient by Design.
Register now and the Electricity Basics primer is yours straight away. The course itself opens January 29, 2027, and you get access the day it opens.
Course overview
Most enterprises, including municipalities, depend on energy they do not fully control. Grid outages, fuel price shocks, cyber-attacks on pipelines and grid operators, and extreme weather events are increasingly impacting operations, supply chains, and balance sheets. Most organizations still carry energy as a facilities line item and discover their actual exposure in the midst of an outage.
This course integrates the concepts of risk management, business continuity, and enterprise resilience, with a focus on energy systems. It draws on Dr. Fiksel's proven design-for-resilience framework, and includes numerous case studies of leading organizations that have built up resilience against energy-related shocks and stresses.
The course distinguishes between operational resilience, the capacity to recover rapidly from disruptions, and strategic resilience, the capacity to anticipate and adapt to turbulent change in the business environment. It also elucidates the potential synergies and trade-offs among resilience, sustainability, and profitability, and demonstrates how resilience improvement has delivered measurable value for both shareholders and stakeholders.
Other courses in the program explain how electricity markets and distributed energy systems work. This course shows how decision-makers can deploy those energy systems effectively in a way that minimizes exposure to crises and enables them to adapt and flourish amidst global challenges.
Who should enroll
This course is designed for professionals who are responsible for decisions about risk, continuity, or capital investment in organizations that depend on reliable, affordable energy. No engineering background is required, and the course lays a foundation for deeper dives into specific energy technologies.
Course organization
The course is organized into three blocks, totaling approximately eight hours.
The Role of Resilience in Energy System
Session 1 · The Risk Landscape
The urgent need for enterprise resilience in a turbulent and complex business environment
- Definition of energy resilience for an enterprise
- Limits of conventional enterprise risk management
- The need for both operational and strategic resilience
- Examples of preparedness for unforeseen black swan events
Session 2 · Disaster Risk Reduction
Interdependencies and potential disruptions in global energy and material networks
- The United Nations Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction
- Energy-related pressure points and potential for cascading disruptions
- The importance of collaboration between businesses and communities
- Selected international examples of resilient risk management practices
Session 3 ·Taking a Systems Approach
Triple Value framework for integrated understanding of resilience and sustainability
- Overview of interactions among industrial, social, and environmental systems
- The nexus between sustainability and resilience, and potential synergies or conflicts
- How circularity contributes to resilience, sustainability, and shareholder value creation
- Examples of simulation tools to model system dynamics and potential future scenarios
Block II
Enterprise Resilience in Action
Session 4 ·Resilience Assessment
Energy-related risk exposures, vulnerabilities, capabilities, and resilience costs and benefits
- Case studies of significant energy-related disruptions and responses from government and industry
- The SCRAM™ methodology for identifying and balancing an enterprise's vulnerabilities and capabilities
- Integrating energy resilience metrics with sustainability and financial performance metrics
- Analytical tools for estimating the expected net benefits of alternative resilience strategies and tactics
Session 5 · System Interactions
Accounting for key links among businesses, communities, and environmental resources
- External factors: grid failures, economic fluctuations, supply chain delays, malicious interference
- Importance of collaboration among utilities, businesses, local governments, and civil society
- Value of resilience practices such as onsite generation and storage, microgrids, demand flexibility
Session 6 · Strategic Foresight
Anticipating fundamental shifts that may disrupt enterprise continuity or viability
- Impacts of technological changes: data centers, electrification, artificial intelligence technology
- Impacts of structural changes: global warming, geopolitical pressures, regulatory policies
- Industry and government examples of disaster risk reduction and post-event recovery
- Application of simulation methods to future scenarios, stress testing, and policy development
Block III
Developing Resilient Systems
Session 7 · Innovative Approaches
Stepwise innovation process for balancing resilience with other management priorities
- Basic principles of life cycle concurrent design applied to design for resilience (DFR)
- Value of resilience practices such as onsite generation and storage, microgrids, demand flexibility
- Opportunities to develop capital investments with inherent no-regrets resilience benefits
- Examples of advanced methods: adaptation pathways, probabilistic decision analysis
Session 8 · The Value Proposition
Resilience challenges, industry and government opportunities, and monetization methods
- Contributions of enterprise resilience to company shareholder value and community prosperity
- Evaluating costs of disruptions and benefits of resilience interventions, including intangible value
- Making a business case to senior leadership for process improvement and innovation
- Conclusions and review of key points in the course
About your instructor
Joseph Fiksel, Ph.D.
Author of Resilient by Design; former VP, Battelle; co-founder, Center for Resilience at Ohio State
Joseph Fiksel is one of the original thought leaders in the field of corporate design for sustainability and resilience. He has consulted for companies, government agencies, and nonprofit consortia in the United States and worldwide. He co-founded the Center for Resilience at The Ohio State University, now part of the Sustainability Institute, and wrote Resilient by Design, the seminal book in the field.
Much of Joseph's consulting work has focused on the energy sector, with clients ranging from the Electric Power Research Institute to major utilities such as American Electric Power, Duke Energy, and ComEd. At Ohio State he led the development of innovative tools for large-scale modeling of industrial and municipal energy and material flows, helping to identify strategic opportunities for decarbonization, circularity, and waste reduction. He has also worked with leading international organizations to apply resilience and sustainability principles to policy and strategy development.
What students say about Joseph Fiksel's teaching
From participants in an earlier short course Dr. Fiksel taught on enterprise resilience.
An excellent introduction to powerful techniques of systems thinking and dynamics … to not only anticipate and manage the wide range of threats … but also to maximize their potential for generating desired and positive outcomes.
Doug Sharp, University of Nevada Las Vegas, instructor and former EPA emergency management official
This course has provided me with knowledge, resources, and examples which I can use to communicate and emphasize the importance and inherent need for resilience.
Stephanie Keller, senior systems and electrical engineer, 25+ years across the public, private, and government sectors; member, IEEE
Who would not like to be more resilient? Take the course!
Nelson Lee, president, Green Sky Sustainability
What you will learn
After this course
You will be able to make a credible business case to senior leadership for energy resilience, and to lead the implementation of strategic initiatives to build resilience into your organization.
How the course runs
Recorded and self-paced
Eighty sessions recorded by Joseph Fiksel, released together when the course opens. Watch in order or go straight to the block you need, on whatever schedule suits you.
Access
Registering now secures the early-bird price and gives you the Energy Basics 101 recording straight away. You then work through the course at whatever pace suits you.
Course materials
- Downloadable slide decks accompany each block.
Energy Basics 101 primer
About 30 minutes, recorded, included with registration and available immediately. Covers the fundamentals of electricity, energy, and power for students with limited technical background. Optional, and no engineering background is required to take the course.
Practitioner webinar series
Ongoing access to the SSF Practitioner Webinar Series, which runs separately from the course and continues with no end date.
Credential from this course
You will receive the SSF Certificate of Completion, awarded after passing the qualifying quiz.
This course also counts toward the SSF Resilient Energy Certificate (any four of the seven program courses) and the SSF Resilient Energy Comprehensive Certificate (all seven). See the full program for the other courses and how the credentials work together.
Register by January 15 to attend the Q&A session with Joseph.· Course opens January 29, 2027
The SSF Resilient Energy Certificate Program
This is one of seven courses in the SSF Resilient Energy Certificate Program. Each course stands on its own. Together, they cover the full working landscape of the U.S. energy sector, taught by senior practitioners in each domain.