EPRI joins with the Ad Hoc Group, Latitude Media, and CenterPoint Energy to host the upcoming Power Resilience Forum—an event focused on the utility industry’s unique grid resilience challenges and opportunities.
For people in the Houston area, Hurricane Beryl had an immediate and lasting impact. By the time Beryl reached Houston, wind speeds reached as high as 84 miles per hour at Houston-Hobby Airport, and downed trees and power lines left 2.7 million people without power. A recent report by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University estimated the storm caused between $2.5 billion and $4.5 billion in property damages, and that the lives of 1 in 8 of the area’s residents were still “very” or “somewhat” impacted.
The storm was also a catalyst for change for CenterPoint Energy, which is the transmission and distribution utility (TDU) serving the Houston area. At the time Beryl hit Houston in July 2024, CenterPoint had already submitted a system resilience plan to regulators for approval. “It became clear after the event that the pace of that resilience plan wasn’t going to meet expectations,” said Jason Ryan, executive vice president at CenterPoint.
In August 2024, CenterPoint launched the Greater Houston Resiliency Program, and in January of this year, the utility submitted a new Systemwide Resiliency Plan to regulators. The initiatives aim at building the most resilient coastal grid in the nation. The plan has many elements aimed at bolstering the grid to withstand the impacts of extreme weather events, like Hurricane Beryl. For example, it includes the segmentation of the distribution grid and the installation of automation devices that can self-heal and restore power without the need for utility worker intervention.
This was a direct lesson from Beryl, as CenterPoint was able to restore power for approximately one million people within the first 48 hours after the storm. “That tells you it was not heavy construction work or heavy damage to facilities. It was the equivalent of going into a breaker box at home and flipping a switch,” Ryan said. “If the system can heal itself and you avoid those million customers being out in the first instance, then the men and women who are so good at restoring power can devote their time where they are needed most.”
Other components of the plan include undergrounding over 50 percent of CenterPoint’s distribution system, elevating nearly all substations above the 500-year floodplain, and installing approximately 130,000 distribution poles to withstand stronger storms and winds. To clarify, the utility’s resilience plans prior to Beryl included some of the same initiatives as the updated version. What changed, however, was the pace of implementation, scale of work, and use of technology. For example, instead of a gradual rollout of distribution system segmentation, the updated plan accelerates segmentation so that 100 percent of the distribution circuits serving the densest concentration of customers is completed in three years.
Similarly, CenterPoint’s Systemwide Resiliency Plan significantly speeds up vegetation trimming cycles from every five-and-a-half years to every three years—an especially important step given CenterPoint’s service territory along the Gulf Coast is both heavily populated and densely vegetated. Since accelerating trimming after Beryl, year-over-year vegetation-caused outages have fallen by three percent.
Although CenterPoint’s plan has many components, what distinguishes it is its sense of urgency. “There’s no silver bullet, it’s a collection of things,” Ryan said. “We know what works. We just made the decision that we want to pick up the pace of the work before the next hurricane and hopefully have a materially different outcome next time because we’ve sped up the pace of getting these projects done.”
CenterPoint is by no means the only utility increasingly focused on resiliency. One sign of the growing importance of resiliency in the power sector is the emergence of venues for utilities to share knowledge and connect with technology providers developing solutions. For example, the Power Resilience Forum (PRF) will take place in Houston from January 21 to 23, 2026. The event is being presented by the Ad Hoc Group and Latitude Media, sponsored by CenterPoint, and in collaboration with EPRI.
EPRI has also targeted collaborative research efforts to improve resilience in the face of increasingly extreme weather as part of its Climate READi initiative. Developed over three years with input from more than 40 utilities and 100 organizations, Climate READi has produced a science-based framework and practical tools to assess physical climate risk and identify adaptation options, supporting utilities, regulators, and policymakers in making effective planning and investment decisions guided by data.
A Growing Sense of Urgency
The necessity to rapidly bolster grid resilience is driven by myriad factors. For example, load growth is increasing rapidly due to demand from data centers, domestic manufacturing, and electrification. As the need for electricity to propel economic growth and societal well-being increases, so too do the stakes of operating a resilient and reliable grid.
But the growing sense of urgency isn’t just about the increasingly pivotal role electric power is playing in everything from powering artificial intelligence (AI) to boosting manufacturing jobs. The increased focus on resilience is also a rational response to protecting a grid exposed to extreme weather events, like Hurricane Beryl. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), the U.S. averaged 23 billion-dollar weather events annually between 2020 and 2024.
Extreme weather events have direct impacts on the residential and commercial customers of utilities. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), American customers experience an average of about 5.5 hours of annual power outages, with more than half of those hours associated with major events including extreme weather. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) most recent reliability assessment highlighted weather stresses as a primary risk to a resilient grid. At a recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conference, NERC President and CEO Jim Robb characterized threats to grid reliability as a “five-alarm fire.”
The reality of extreme weather’s threat to the grid has prompted a stronger pivot to adaptation measures designed to help the power system withstand high winds, extreme heat and cold, and other extreme weather events.
“In the past couple of decades, the industry focused heavily on mitigation—deploying renewables and zero-emission technologies to prevent extreme weather from worsening,” said Julia Hamm, partner at the Ad Hoc Group, a firm that helps climate tech startups accelerate growth. “The reality today is that we are seeing a rise in the frequency, intensity, and more widespread instances of both extreme weather events and wildfire events. In our industry, we refer to it as resilience. But it really is about adapting—changing how we plan and operate the grid in this new reality, which is only going to get worse as opposed to better.”
Utility and regulatory activity in response to growing resiliency threats is accelerating. For example, states such as California, Oregon, and Washington require utilities to regularly file wildfire mitigation plans, whereas states like Texas and Florida require storm preparedness plans. Pressure is also coming from investors, many of whom now factor climate risk into their utility investments.
An evolution in how grid resilience is measured is also underway. While traditional SAIDI and SAIFI metrics remain in place, groups such as IEEE are actively investigating broadening these metrics to capture resilience. For example, California and other western states are developing frameworks that aim to quantify the effectiveness of resilience investments in reducing risk. Other metrics include the amount of time it takes utilities to restore critical loads or for all outages on a system to be addressed.
Bridging the Gap Between Utilities and Technology Providers
As extreme weather becomes more severe and frequent, many utilities are investigating a growing menu of technology solutions that promise to aid their adaptation and response efforts. However, some obstacles prevent utilities and technology providers from collaborating to pilot and deploy solutions for detecting wildfires and other extreme weather events. Utilities are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of grid resilience-focused technologies to evaluate. For their part, technology providers are new to the long and often complex utility procurement process.
New approaches are emerging to foster more efficient and impactful collaboration between technology companies and utilities. One way technology providers can help utilities is by working together to present a unified solution to resiliency challenges, says Hamm. “How do you make it seamless for the utility. It needs to become a seamless approach to solving the utility’s problem as opposed to the utility having very siloed solutions and vendors who aren’t coordinating,” Hamm said.
Utilities can help accelerate this process by proactively defining the resilience challenges they would like technology companies to help solve. In 2023, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) released a list of its most challenging technical and operational challenges and urged technology companies to offer solutions and the opportunity to partner with PG&E to develop and implement them. More recently, the utility hosted a three-day Innovation Pitch Fest, where technology companies with solutions to reduce wildfire risk and other challenges could present their ideas and compete for up to $25 million in funding, as well as a pathway to co-develop and scale their solutions into PG&E’s systems.
“This is a way to prevent both technology companies and the utility from wasting a lot of time talking about things that don’t actually solve the problems that matter most to a utility,” said Hamm, who was formerly president of the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) and the founder of RE+, the largest energy trade show in North America. Other ways Hamm believes utilities and technology companies can collaborate more effectively on resilience are described below.
Creating Space for Collaboration
These and other topics will be on the agenda at PRF in January, 2026. Although resilience-focused events have proliferated in recent years, PRF was established to address the specific needs of the power sector. “We are seeing events where resilience is just a small sliver of the programming and others that are hyper-focused on topics like wildfires,” Hamm said. “The gap we saw was there was nothing in the middle that was power sector specific and focused on how the rise of extreme weather and wildfire events is changing how we have to plan and operate the grid.”
EPRI will present a half-day Climate READi workshop on January 21, where attendees will learn about the tools and strategies to address and manage the physical climate risk to the power system. Many utilities and technology companies will share their perspectives and experiences on effective ways to bolster grid resilience, including presentations by Duke Energy, Xcel Energy, CPS Energy, Edison International, and Morgan Scott, EPRI’s Vice of Global Partnerships and Outreach. “It is really intended to be a big umbrella of attendees from a power sector standpoint,” Hamm said. “That means getting all of the right stakeholders in the room, from the utilities to the technology companies to the regulators, investors, insurers, and the credit rating agencies.”
What does success look like? To Hamm, it’s if utilities share what works well and other utilities replicate their success. Another metric of success is the presence of ongoing engagement among the broad ecosystem of stakeholders attending the event. Hamm also hopes that getting people together can generate fresh new ideas about how to improve resilience. “Hopefully this strategic level conversation spurs ideas that people hadn’t yet been thinking about and really sort of gets the wheels turning on what needs to change,” she said.
As utilities confront the reality that extreme weather will only intensify, events like the Power Resilience Forum represent a necessary evolution—from isolated efforts to collaborative strategy. The question is no longer whether to invest in resilience, but how quickly utilities can implement solutions before the next storm hits. For CenterPoint and utilities across the country, the race is on to build grids capable of withstanding what’s coming next.
