When the fires ravaged Los Angeles at the beginning of 2025, causing billions of dollars in damages, they set a clear tone for the rest of the year. As climate change worsens extreme weather, the energy sector can no longer treat physical risk as anomalous. For utilities and regulators, volatility is now a constant operational baseline.
Accordingly, utilities across the country have been developing and implementing resiliency plans, both voluntarily and prompted by regulators. And industry organizations are developing tools to help, such as the Electric Power Research Institute’s Climate READi initiative’s framework for assessing utilities’ physical climate risk and response options.
In Texas, for example, CenterPoint Energy got approval for a major, $2.7 billion systemwide resiliency plan to reduce extreme weather-related power outages, which includes automation of power lines, elevating substation, and vegetation management. It is the largest of many resiliency plans announced in the state this year as a response to requirements introduced by Texas regulators in 2023, following the outages caused by a series of extreme weather events, including Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
Elsewhere, New York’s Con Edison released a Climate Change Resilience Plan in February 2025, and Xcel Energy approved a $1.9 billion Colorado wildfire mitigation plan in August.
Artificial intelligence has played an important role in most if not all of these efforts, with utilities pursuing collaborations with traditional vendors, startups, and, more rarely, in-house developments. Outage prediction and fault detection, AI-enhanced weather forecasting, vegetation management, and self-healing grids are among its most common use cases at the moment.
For example, in the U.S., CenterPoint has been collaborating with Technosylva on wildfire mitigation and prevention, as well as flood risk modeling. More globally, major electricity company Iberdrola, which operates transmission and distribution lines across the U.S., Brazil, and Europe, has been working with Spanish start-up Woza Labs to use AI to improve data analysis, visualization, and risk forecasting for its grid.
(At the Distributech conference in March, these two themes of AI and resiliency effectively shared the stage, with companies like GE Vernova and Schneider Electric demonstrating their generative AI tools for things such as grid planning and predictive analytics).
Money movement
These practical applications have been accompanied by signs that the sector is maturing from a commercial point of view as well, with some relevant consolidations and growing investor interest.
Most prominently, in October, Itron announced plans to acquire Urbint, a platform used to identify critical infrastructure risks, for $325 million. And last summer GE Vernova acquired Alteia, a French software company using AI and machine learning to bring visual intelligence into utility operations, and started integrating it into its grid orchestration platform.
More broadly, climate tech investors are now starting to consider adaptation and resilience as a target investment opportunity, as interesting and in need of capital as mitigation. Azolla Ventures, for example, which aggregates tax-exempt philanthropic capital from foundations and uses it in a venture capital context to fund the first steps of high-risk startups, has recently broadened its investment strategy to include resiliency as well. And the trend has gone way past niche climate players, with major consulting firm Boston Consulting Group pointing to resilience solutions as an opportunity for private equity as well.
This creates some tension in the market, requiring investors to grapple with what it means to back solutions that are premised on the fact that the climate fight is not going as well as hoped. During an interview with Latitude Media to discuss recent climate investment trends, Tariq Nanji, a climate investing partner at Boston Consulting Group, described this as counterintuitive: “You’re investing in an adaptation or resilience solution, but you’re also kind of underwriting things getting worse,” he said.
This dynamic is pushing industry players to deal with dilemmas that are both philosophical and extremely practical, such as how to put a monetary value on grid resilience. In a report published this summer, the industry group Smart Electric Power Alliance and climate resilience planning platform Rhizome highlighted the importance of that metric for decisions like whether building an emergency microgrid is worth the cost, even if you don’t really know when and if you’ll need it.
“The monetary value is still a little bit hard to put your finger on,” said Mac Keller, resilience manager at SEPA, told Latitude Media. “It’s early days, and there’s not a generally accepted silver bullet for valuing resilience. It’s what folks are looking for, but I’m not sure how we’re going to get there.”
