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System planners and grid operators are treating extreme heat as an assumed operating condition given new pressures, including drought, demand growth, and fuel concerns. Will it be enough? For decades, the U.S. power system treated extreme heat as a tail risk, managed through seasonal readiness—something for which to prepare. But hotter conditions are now arriving […]

Wildfires are no longer isolated disasters limited to the western United States—they are a growing threat to communities, infrastructure, and electric grid reliability nationwide. For the 42 million Americans served by electric cooperatives, the risk is especially acute. Co-ops power more than half the nation’s landmass, primarily in rural areas where wildfire danger is highest […]

As fire-weather risk expands beyond California, utilities are turning to sub-kilometer, asset-level forecasts to support public safety power shutoff decisions they can defend in front of regulators. When the National Weather Service (NWS) issued routine convective outlooks on the morning of May 27, 2025, public guidance for the Houston metro called for widespread 30 to […]

NextNav, a Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) company with a history of telecommunications mergers, requested a rule change that would allow it to build out a network of high-power broadband operations. The proposed rule would impact every U.S. electric utility.

Utilities, federal agencies, and the national labs have finally assembled the tools to harden the grid against an increasingly hostile environment. The question is whether they can put them together fast enough. When a line of storms tore across the Northeast in late April 2025, racing from Ohio into central Pennsylvania, meteorologists recognized the signature […]

Summer is the season utilities brace for. Demand peaks as air conditioners run flat out, equipment runs hot, and the workforce that keeps the grid alive does so under some of the year’s most punishing conditions. The same months that strain transformers and conductors also strain the people climbing structures and pulling cable beneath them. […]

The power generation sector, including electric utilities and grid operators, recognizes the value of moving equipment underground to mitigate outages, lessen risks to assets, and reduce the chances of that equipment causing a wildfire.

Companies are deploying a variety of strategies in efforts to strengthen the power grid against severe weather and other issues.

From EOP-012-3 to Order 587-AB, from Cold Weather Critical Component inventories to dual-fuel conversions, the bulk power system has spent five years rewiring how it prepares for extreme cold. Winter Storm Fern, the latest test, showed the system ran “very close to the edge.” The last five winters have given the North American power sector […]

Extreme weather is making one thing clear—hardening of the power grid alone is not enough to solve the problem of keeping the lights on.