Communities without bootstraps : necessary conditions for community energy resilience potential

Abstract

Community energy resilience, defined as a community's ability to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, and recover from energy disruptions, is a pivotal domain of overall community resilience. Despite a proliferation of assessment tools, their actionability is often undermined by capacity and governance deficits in small communities. This study investigates the fundamental qualities necessary for community energy resilience to be meaningful, measurable, and actionable, particularly for smaller localities. A Resilience Possibility Index, based on the physical presence of services needed during a prolonged power outage, was quantified for 15 Virginia localities. An Authority Index for the Public Health & Safety domain was also analyzed. Empirical analysis confirmed a strong positive correlation between population size and the Composite Resilience Possibility Index (R² = .75, p < .0001), a finding that aligns with urban scaling principles. While large, independent cities achieved high potential, many small towns displayed profound deficits and were constrained by a lack of jurisdictional control over essential services. These results confirm that smaller localities often function as resource-constrained subsystems of larger regional entities. We conclude that a diagnostic pre-assessment is appropriate to determine a community’s readiness for complex resilience planning, thereby guiding resources toward foundational capacity-building where it is most needed.