Balancing Reliability and Resilience: How Utilities Are Preparing for Climate-Related Hazards
As climate-related hazards including storms, hurricanes, and wildfires grow in frequency and intensity, electric utilities face an increasingly difficult investment challenge: how to balance traditional reliability investments with the broader, longer-horizon demands of resilience. This panel brings together executives and operational leaders from leading utilities to explore how their organizations are making strategic infrastructure decisions under conditions of deepening uncertainty. Panelists will discuss how they are prioritizing hardening investments, leveraging grid modernization technologies, and engaging regulators and communities, while also focusing on day-to-day system performance. The session will examine real-world trade-offs, practices, and the evolving frameworks utilities are using to define, measure, and operationalize resilience in an era of accelerating climate-related hazards.