As Hazards Intensify, Forward-Thinking Utilities Are Turning Grid Challenges into Strategic Opportunities
Hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes and other extreme weather events are increasingly challenging utility operations across the country. Despite the frequency and severity of these events, utilities are still expected to deliver on three priorities at once: reliability, affordability and resilience.
Balancing these priorities has always required careful planning, but extreme weather is making that balance harder to achieve and more important to get right. The good news? Utilities that tackle these challenges strategically can identify opportunities to reduce disruption risk, support operational continuity, inform investment and modernization planning and prepare for electrification needs.
A New Era for Utility Planning
Today, the environment utilities operate in, and the priorities they must balance, are very different from even a decade ago. Reliability, affordability, safety and regulatory compliance remain foundational but now sit alongside a growing set of pressures that are reshaping how utilities plan.
While customer expectations are rising and tolerance for disruption is falling, energy demand is climbing rapidly. In addition, much of the infrastructure utilities rely on is rapidly aging and needs modernization to continue to provide safe and reliable power and meet the capacity associated with increasing demand, requiring capital investments over the course of decades. This means investment decisions made today can either allow for worsening future impacts or improve grid resilience.
Layered on top of these traditional planning factors are climate-related hazards: flooding, hurricanes, severe storms, extreme precipitation, heatwaves, drought, wildfires and sea level rise. Each of these hazards carries the potential for infrastructure damage, outages, new risks to worker safety and the public, and disruptions to the customers utilities serve. Meanwhile, Public Utility Commissions are evolving their expectations, resilience and climate disclosure initiatives are expanding and NERC reliability requirements continue to develop, while customers and policy makers are demanding affordability and closely scrutinizing any rate increases. Utilities that understand how these factors intersect are better equipped to plan proactively.
Rethinking the Planning Playbook
For decades, utilities have used historical weather data to guide planning decisions, including line ratings, infrastructure design standards and operational procedures. That approach is becoming less reliable, as weather patterns shift away from previous norms. According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, power outages from extreme weather events in the United States rose by approximately 64% from 2011–2021, compared to 2000–2010. Without effective adaptation measures, this trend may continue, especially because available projections indicate certain extreme-weather hazards may increase in frequency, intensity, duration or variability, depending on the hazard and location.
At the same time, adaptation investment and affordability have become more closely connected, adding to the challenges utilities face in building resilience. Hardening infrastructure and adapting operations to the impacts of extreme weather involves real costs, which can affect customer rates. Historically, these resilience investments may have been treated as a supplemental consideration after core planning decisions have been made.
Climate resilience planning is an opportunity to reframe this relationship and support reliability and affordability over time. Resilience planning can help utilities identify and evaluate exposure to outage costs, emergency capital spending, and compliance risk and then inform investments and decision making to reduce risks and build resilience. For example, utilities can evaluate whether poles and cross arms with higher ratings could reduce outage and restoration risks under more frequent and severe storm conditions.
Regulators Are Taking Notice
Some regulators are reinforcing this shift, as Public Utility Commissions in states including New York, California and Maine, are increasingly requiring climate risk assessments and resilience planning as part of regulatory filings. Broader climate risk disclosure requirements and other requirements to build resilience to extreme weather are reinforcing this trend across the industry.
This is both a compliance consideration and a planning opportunity. Utilities that begin this work proactively are better positioned to align it with their own capital planning timelines. Proactive planning can help utilities coordinate resilience planning with capital planning timelines and provide information relevant to future regulatory filings and cost-effectiveness assessments. This type of proactive planning can also help demonstrate to customers and regulators a commitment to maintaining reliable power and long-term cost savings, which can help justify rate cases. It is a resilience planning discipline, not a resilience spending discipline, and it’s what regulators are increasingly asking to see in terms of cost-effectiveness analysis and risk quantification, not just a list of projects.
Turning Critical Insights into Actionable Solutions
TRC’s deep bench of climate scientists, electrical engineers, emergency managers, planners and utility experts offers utilities practical and scalable approaches to understand and address climate risk. Our approach pairs relevant climate science with engineering insights to help utilities understand their climate risk and plan for resilience. This process helps utilities answer key questions that include:
- What hazards are they exposed to? Where are they exposed and under what timeframes?
- What types of assets, infrastructure and operations are vulnerable to those hazards?
- What are the expected impacts to reliability, operations and safety? How could these impacts affect the missions of each department within the utility? What are the potential costs?
- What is their current level of readiness? What are strengths to build on and where are critical gaps to fill?
- What types of resilience strategies help address these risks? How should investment be prioritized?
- How can resilience be mobilized into practice? How can it align with other existing risk management frameworks and operating procedures?
The goal of this approach is to produce actionable, well-documented and data-driven solutions that subject matter experts and capital planners can use to inform their decision-making.
Finding the Right Starting Point, Wherever You Are
Climate resilience planning is best understood as a continuum. Utilities can enter at a scope that matches their current needs and resources and build from there as capacity and priorities evolve.
Using TRC’s climate resilience toolkit, we can tailor our full system-scale approach to the unique conditions and risks to your utility. We also understand that a full system scale assessment is not feasible for every utility. Budget, timeline and organizational readiness all shape what is possible at any given point. Through our work, we have found that there are meaningful starting points that a utility can take to addressing risks and building resilience, including:
A Climate Resilience Audit
Offers a structured review of existing hardening and reliability efforts, along with recommendations for next steps.
A Site-Specific Climate Risk Profile
Provides a focused risk assessment for a single critical site, such as a new substation.
Projections Mapping
Delivers downscaled climate data for a service territory to inform early stages of resilience planning, updates to existing studies, line ratings and design standards.
An Operational Risk and Resilience Pilot
Offers a department level assessment that connects climate risk to existing enterprise risk management processes.
Why This Is a Shared Priority
Reliability, affordability and resilience are all interconnected priorities when it comes to addressing climate risk. Underinvestment in resilience can have downstream effects on the other two over time. Delaying appropriate hardening of a vulnerable asset can increase exposure to outage costs and emergency spending and may contribute to future rate pressure.
Utilities that incorporate climate resilience planning into their core infrastructure strategy are likely to be better positioned as regulatory expectations and physical risk continue to evolve. This is an opportunity to build a stronger, more adaptable system, giving utilities a credible story to tell regulators and customers about why the spend is happening and what it delivers in return.
Next Step: TRC Can Help
Every organization is at a different point in its climate resilience journey and TRC can help you find your next step. Our tailored resilience toolkit provides a structured approach to evaluate exposure and criticality and inform investment prioritization in support of reliability and affordability objectives. TRC also offers an independent audit of current efforts, a focused risk profile for a single site or a pilot that ties climate risk into your broader risk management approach.
Resilience planning works best as an ongoing process, not a one-time fix. Reach out to TRC for a resilience audit or start with a conversation and turn today’s evaluation into tomorrow’s advantage.
