The grid resilience dilemma

24 snips

Nov 14, 2025

Julia Hamm, a partner at The Ad Hoc Group and former CEO of the Smart Electric Power Alliance, dives into the complex realm of grid resilience. She discusses the staggering trillion-dollar investments utilities are planning and how much should focus on resilience amidst rising costs. Julia also explores the rise of resilience technologies, like wildfire detection and predictive analytics, and their potential to turn resilience into opportunities. The conversation highlights the critical need for data-driven decisions in balancing affordability with effective grid management.

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INSIGHT

Resilience Is A Fraction Of Planned Spending

EEI estimates a trillion dollars of grid investment by 2030 but only about a quarter may target resilience.
Utilities spent roughly $30 billion on adaptation and hardening in 2024, implying resilience is a subset of planned spending.

INSIGHT

Define Reliability Versus Resilience

Regulators treat reliability and resilience differently, which affects cost recovery and rate treatment.
Distinguishing those definitions is essential to decide what goes in the rate base versus special resilience funding.

ADVICE

Prioritize High-Impact Short-Term Actions

Prioritize short-term actions like microgrids for fire stations before costly long-term projects like mass undergrounding.
Use targeted, high-impact measures first to protect communities and spread investment over time.

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Utilities are facing a collision of pressures: extreme weather, rising load, affordability concerns, and growing regulatory friction. Everyone agrees the grid needs to be hardened. But the real question is: how much resilience should we pay for?

On one side, utilities are confronting unprecedented stress from storms, wildfires, flooding, and heat. On the other, they’re under pressure from regulators and customers to keep rates down — even as costs spike from inflation, supply chain delays, and long-overdue modernization.

The Edison Electric Institute estimates that utilities are planning about a trillion dollars in grid investment by 2030. But how much of that is truly focused on resilience? And how do we balance the need for those investments with all the other cost pressures hitting the system?

This week, we’re joined by Julia Hamm, a partner with the Ad Hoc Group, to break down where resilience fits in. We look at how utilities justify resilience spending, how regulators are responding, and why so much of the debate comes down to defining the line between reliability, resilience, and routine maintenance.

Then we widen the lens to the emerging resilience-tech market, a growing ecosystem of startups focused on wildfire detection, predictive weather analytics, vegetation management, sensors, and advanced grid modeling. We explore how these technologies could help utilities target investments and turn resilience into opportunity rather than pure cost.

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With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!