Cybersecurity, Reliability & CIP

This panel at the 2025 NARUC Summer Policy Summit explored competing policy demands. On the panel were moderator and NARUC Senior Director Kim Duffley, ISO New England CEO Gordon van Welie, District of Columbia Commission Chair Emile Thompson, Northeast Power Coordinating Council CEO Charles Dickerson, Avangrid Networks CEO Joe Purington, GT Power Group President Glen Thomas, and Copper Monarch Principal Vincent Duane.

The 2025 NARUC Summer Policy Summit featured a conversation between Exelon CEO Calvin Butler and NARUC President and Georgia Commissioner Tricia Pridemore. There was a lot to talk about with Butler, who leads one of the nation’s largest utility companies, serving more than 10.7 million customers through six fully regulated transmission and distribution utilities – Atlantic City Electric, BGE, ComEd, Delmarva Power, PECO, and Pepco. He also is chair of the board of the Edison Electric Institute and leads some twenty thousand Exelon employees.

“Developed in collaboration with over forty electric companies and one hundred organizations, EPRI released the Climate READi: Power Framework in May 2025. This framework provides guidance, references, and tools to assess asset and system risks to physical climate conditions.”

“Evergy’s strategic tenets are affordability, reliability, and sustainability. If you ever put too much emphasis on one of those tenets at the expense of the others, you’ll get out of balance and run into trouble. Out of balance inevitably creates issues with key constituents.”

“All these resources coming on have a lower accredited capacity than traditional resources. You have to make sure you’re meeting that supply-demand balance in an already tight market. That’s what we’re focused on. We’re also focused on getting more transmission built.”

“To mitigate these risks, utilities must identify, prioritize, and protect key systems and networks by upgrading legacy infrastructure and segmenting networks to reduce the spread of cyber threats.”

Navigating Reliability, Affordability, and Decarbonization: “Like the three legs of a stool, affordability, reliability and decarbonization must each be supported to maintain a stable and forward-looking energy system. At Central Hudson, we’re especially focused on affordability for our customers who are feeling the brunt of the rising cost of living.”

“By clearly distinguishing energy efficiency from electrification and adopting comprehensive strategies informed by full-fuel-cycle data, policymakers can ensure practical, realistic, and effective progress toward achieving shared climate goals.”

Extreme weather events can devastate utility infrastructure. This panel on Weathering the Storm (Resilience and Extreme Weather) discussed resilient, cost-effective strategies for safeguarding energy systems while exploring critical questions on responsibility and costs in the face of extreme weather.

“At an enterprise level, what every utility should do is create a risk profile for these facilities. Not every substation is built the same, and they all face different challenges.”