Water and energy systems are often highly interdependent – water enables energy generation and energy enables water use. While this general relationship holds across temporal and spatial scales, the particular inter-dependencies vary between operations and long term planning, and from plants to cities to regions. We aim to better understand relationships among water and energy systems and their implications for the design of resilient systems. We apply a framework for understanding resilient systems following Folke et al. (2010), by which resilience comprises three capabilities: system persistence, adaptation, and transformation. We consider how this framework may apply to diagnose and design the resilience of the U.S. bulk electricity system to water-driven stressors; We provide a qualitative description of the spectrum of resilience capabilities (persistence, adaptation, and transformation) for different scales of the water-electricity system in the U.S., and discuss how water relates to and interacts with other drivers of planning for electricity resilience such as technology innovation, energy markets and integration of renewables. We further discuss modeling needs and potential applications to water-electricity resilience efforts.