Risk Mitigation Takes Center Stage
Richelle Elberg is a principal research analyst overseeing Guidehouse Insights’ Energy Storage solutions. She also supports the Digital Innovations, Neural Grid, and AI and Advanced Analytics solutions.
Mackinnon Lawrence is a director in Guidehouse’s global Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure practice and the leader of Guidehouse Insights. He is responsible for overall strategy and operations.
Michelle Fay is a partner in the Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure segment supporting clients as they implement transformational programs. She brings more than twenty years of experience planning and delivering complex and innovative programs for utilities.
Dan Hahn leads the Energy Providers practice within the Guidehouse global Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure segment. He advises executives on strategies to address complex operational, financial, and organizational challenges.
Resilience and hardening of power grid infrastructure are far and away the most pressing issues American utilities are dealing with in 2024. Even as the energy transition accelerates — bolstered by decarbonization policies aimed at climate change impacts, technological advances, and improved economics for green generation and grid integration — utilities are grappling with an increase in storm-related outages and aging infrastructure.
In the most recent survey conducted by Guidehouse and Public Utilities Fortnightly, the majority of respondents (sixty-one percent) agreed that "increasing flexibility to improve energy system resilience" is the highest priority outcome for utility investments today.
This represents an important focusing of industry investment beyond electrification, clean energy, distributed energy, and grid modernization and increasingly toward solutions that mitigate risk. As utilities seek to accelerate flexibility and hardening initiatives, familiar challenges, such as creating new interconnections for large-scale renewable integration and an increasingly competitive, distributed, and diverse operating environment persist. Power utilities in the U.S are weathering an unnerving period of disruption — one that promises to endure for decades.