In the hours before Winter Storm Fern touched down, hundreds of utility executives and service providers, among others, gathered in a Houston hotel. By the time the inaugural two-day Power Resilience Forum came to a close, temperatures outside had dropped dramatically, and attendees were racing to the airport to beat the storm.
It was a fitting backdrop for the event, hosted by Latitude Media and the Ad Hoc Group. Utilities have taken steps to harden their infrastructure since Winter Storm Uri caused several days of unplanned power outages and hundreds of deaths in Texas five years ago. And last week there was the sense in the room of an impending test: Would their efforts be enough to keep the lights on?
As climate change worsens extreme weather, conversations about power resilience are happening more often, and more publicly. As Camilo Serna, senior VP of strategy and external engagement at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, told the audience, extreme events like polar vortexes and heat domes are becoming routine: “These types of storms are happening every year, almost; before, they were happening every decade.”
While widespread outages were predicted across much of the U.S., Fern caused less damage than feared. For most of the impacted utilities — with the exception of some in the Southeast that dealt with outages from frozen or downed power lines — the grid held up as it is supposed to, with minimal customer frustration.
And what a relief. As Anthony Oni, managing partner at Energy Impact Partners coined, the utility goal is increasingly becoming “invisible resiliency,” meaning customers shouldn’t even have to think about the grid’s reliability in a crisis. As electricity costs increase, customers’ expectations of utilities are higher — right as load growth and extreme weather coincide to make maintaining service harder than ever.
“I think the best outcome that we can have for the industry through the investments that we make is that you never see the outage, that it doesn’t impact your lives,” said Oni, noting that this “invisibility” is the goal behind the 100-plus investments that EIP has made in the space.
The invisibility mandate requires new technologies and new investments — and a fundamental shift in how the sector has been run for decades. As Duke Austin, president and CEO of Quanta Services said, expectations for utilities have increased “tenfold” in the last 20 years: “I don’t know how we think we can run the system the same way and plan the same way and spend the same kind of resources and dollars.”
Balancing costs and risks
Utilities are trying to strike a balance between keeping costs down and keeping risks down.
The goals can be at odds. Consider the debate over undergrounding power lines. On the one hand, burying power lines underground is clearly the safest way to prevent wildfires and protect the grid from extreme weather. On the other, in disaster-prone areas there’s a need for speed as extreme weather worsens — and everyone is conscious about increasing costs.
The urgency is even more significant for utilities whose equipment has contributed to disaster. Southern California Edison has acknowledged that its lines most likely caused last year’s devastating Eaton Fire in the Los Angeles enclave of Altadena, which killed 19 people. At PRF, Pedro Pizarro, CEO of parent company Edison International, walked through the company’s choice to go with covered conductors in most cases, which involves wrapping lines in a thin layer of insulation to prevent short circuits if they come into contact with vegetation.
Covering conductors is both less expensive than undergrounding, and much faster. “In many cases we don’t even have to change poles out,” Pizarro said. “That’s how SCE has been able to harden 90% of the system in just a few years.”
According to Pizarro, undergrounding a mile of wires in the utility’s territory can cost between $1.5 million and $5 million, depending on the terrain. That said, the company is still embracing the practice in “the highest consequence areas,” including the lines to rural towns that are most vulnerable to fire.
A growing number of technology startups have arrived on the scene promising to help utilities harden. While utilities are historically cautious about adopting new technologies, resilience is one area where they’re moving faster because extreme weather presents an existential risk. PG&E was hit with $30 billion in liabilities from horrific wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that killed scores of people and leveled the town of Paradise, California, ultimately forcing it to file for bankruptcy.
Since then, PG&E’s resilience efforts have included embracing artificial intelligence, according to Andy Abranches, the utility’s VP of wildfire mitigation.
“We are putting machine learning on every bit of data that’s coming out of our smart meters to detect where our system is getting weaker. We’re putting early fail detection technologies. We’re putting devices on our poles to spot when incidents happen,” Abranches said. “Continuous monitoring, in my mind, is going to be needed by every utility” given worsening extreme weather.
Technosylva, a nearly-30-year-old company that in recent years, has also embraced AI. CEO Bryan Spear told Latitude Media in 2024 that the market for asset-level fire risk data only recently started to take off; previously, the 29-year-old company developed geographic information systems technology to help fire agencies model active fires.
However, Spear acknowledged at PRF that small- or medium-sized utilities cannot simply copy what major California utilities like SCE and PG&E have done. Instead, technology that pinpoints where risk is highest can help smaller teams protect their customers for much less than the cost of massive infrastructure upgrades. “Wildfire intelligence needs to be in the hands of every utility,” he added.
The fight for customers
Invisible resilience is not just a matter of preventing outages or — even worse — avoiding utility-caused disasters. It’s also a matter of utilities maintaining a positive, or at least neutral, reputation among customers. And that requires keeping costs reasonable.
Regulators are increasingly focused on whether resilience investments are optimized for customers who are most impacted. They want to make sure the whole state doesn’t pay for infrastructure that only benefits affluent, high-risk areas.
But that can be challenging.As Tammy Cordova, a commissioner on Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission explained, regulatory bodies are not necessarily designed “to be treating different customers differently” when it comes to setting rates or implementing decisions like power service shutoffs.
The dilemma is on display in Nevada, where there is a risk divide between the north and south of the state.
“Northern Nevada is where our fire risk is; Southern Nevada is where our heat risk is and a flooding risk,” Cordova said, adding that the whole state is paying for the required region-level hardening. “How do you define fairness if you’re going to charge all customers for things on the system that may not benefit them?”
Utilities pass those costs on to ratepayers, which is touchy in a moment when rising electricity prices have become a political flashpoint nationwide. A report out today found that utility rate hikes hit $31 billion in 2025. While much of the public’s upset is directed at large loads like data centers, an October 2025 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that grid hardening and extreme weather recovery and mitigation were some of the biggest contributors to rising rates between 2019 and 2024.
It was against this backdrop that Mari McClure, CEO of Green Mountain Power, argued that true invisible resilience will require radical accountability from utilities, who she said tend to spend too much time on analysis of the problem and not enough time on action. For instance, she said any outage is the responsibility of a utility’s leadership, rather than the fault of the weather or anyone else: “No more outages in Vermont is our goal,” she said.
Perhaps most startling to the room of regulated utility executives, she encouraged her peers to start acting like they need to fight for their customers, and even make resilience decisions based on what is best for the customer rather than on what regulators or investors might prefer.
“What would we be doing differently if we snapped our fingers…and we had to compete for our customers?” McClure asked the crowd. “Let’s start getting that in motion.”
