Energy Disruptions and Resilience: Takeaways from Our Recent Webinar
Climate change is already causing more frequent and severe weather events, and these events pose an increasing threat to the resilience of our power grid and other critical pieces of infrastructure. Addressing these challenges and strengthening system resilience requires insights from diverse disciplines and collaboration among researchers, policymakers, and utilities. Our recent webinar, featuring experts from academia and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), focused on these issues. The panelists included Dr. Duncan Callaway of UC Berkeley, Dr. Mikhail Chester of Arizona State University, Dr. Erica Fischer of Oregon State University, and Leuwam Tesfai of the CPUC.
Dr. Callaway kicked off the discussion by framing key tradeoffs in power system planning and operations, such as balancing economic, reliability, and environmental goals. He noted that while low-cost renewables are enabling greater alignment of economic and environmental objectives, reliability remains a critical challenge, especially given growing demand uncertainty and climate adaptation needs. Dr. Callaway shared research findings on the extensive distribution system upgrades needed to accommodate electric vehicle and building electrification loads in Pacific Gas & Electric territory. He also highlighted potential equity implications, with an analysis of Southern California Edison’s service area revealing that communities with more Black and Latin American residents tend to have less grid capacity available for distributed energy resources per household, which could exacerbate disparities if not proactively managed.
Dr. Callaway then discussed his work with colleagues on the impacts of California’s Public Safety Power Shutoffs, implemented to reduce wildfire risk. They found that in rural areas prone to shutoffs, customers were significantly more likely to adopt battery storage to maintain reliability. However, looking beyond individual customer decisions, Dr. Callaway emphasized the need for policymakers and utilities to more rigorously assess risk-cost tradeoffs, as even highly effective fire-prevention measures like fast trip reclosers still leave residual risk that may be more efficiently mitigated through other strategies like vegetation management.
Dr. Chester then discussed his team’s work on modeling infrastructure interdependencies and cascading failures under different hazards. By bringing together models of power, water, and transportation systems, they can assess vulnerabilities even with gaps in real-world data, which is often patchy or unavailable at the most granular levels. Running millions of simulations with different disruption scenarios, they found that power and water outages rarely coincide in the same geographic areas, posing coordination challenges for emergency response. Moreover, their models reveal the potential for high-impact, low-probability events like blackouts affecting a quarter of a city, underscoring the need to grapple with growing systemic complexity and uncertainty.
Dr. Chester highlighted how the boundaries of the power system are rapidly expanding and blurring with other domains like transportation and buildings. With the rise of electric vehicles, smart thermostats, and distributed energy resources, there are increasingly complex questions around who controls these assets and how they interact with the bulk power system. He argued that the current governance structures for the grid, largely established a century ago, are mismatched to the challenges of deep decarbonization, digitalization, and resilience we face today.
Next, Dr. Fischer shared her research on wildfire impacts on water infrastructure, particularly plastic pipes that can leach contaminants when exposed to high heat. Her team found that both heat exposure and depressurization that allows contaminated air to enter pipes can cause widespread drinking water contamination, as evidenced by testing of actual burned areas. By collecting samples at water meter locations and utilizing GIS mapping of burn severity and critical community assets, utilities can more strategically target post-fire pipe replacements and flushing. Dr. Fischer’s team has also tested different pipe materials to determine their resilience to heat, finding that there are key temperature thresholds above which substantial contamination occurs. Metal pipes, while not invulnerable, appeared significantly more heat resistant than plastic pipes. Combining material testing, numerical simulations of heat transfer, and experiments burning large structural assemblies, Dr. Fischer is developing screening tools to help communities better prepare for and respond to the drinking water crises that increasingly accompany wildfires.
Dr. Fischer also underscored the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration to understand not just infrastructure impacts, but the broader social disruptions of wildfires. She noted the particular challenges facing rural, wildland-urban interface communities that often lack resources and formal governance structures. She has been working closely with affected communities to co-develop sampling protocols, risk communication strategies, and recovery plans, stressing the need to build durable partnerships and networks.
Finally, Leuwam Tesfai provided a regulator’s perspective on how the CPUC is working to enhance grid resilience while also meeting the state’s ambitious clean energy targets, including 60% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045. The CPUC’s efforts span a wide range of investments in both utility infrastructure and community-level resilience. On the utility side, these include hardening and automation measures like covered conductors and fast trip reclosers, but also foundational changes to risk assessment, safety culture, and investment decisionmaking processes.
Ms. Tesfai highlighted the CPUC’s development of a new Wildfire Mitigation Plan framework, which requires utilities to systematically identify and prioritize infrastructure investments based on risk modeling and stakeholder input. Related efforts include the creation of a Safety Policy Division to independently assess utility safety performance, and the use of the state’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment as a common planning basis for climate adaptation across regulatory processes.
Ms. Tesfai emphasized that creating a clean, safe, affordable, and reliable grid is not a question of if, but how. Achieving these goals will require new levels of coordination across state agencies, from the CPUC’s regulatory oversight to the California Energy Commission’s demand forecasting and the California ISO’s transmission planning. It will also require an unwavering commitment to equity, as formalized in the CPUC’s Environmental and Social Justice Action Plan. Most of all, it will depend on the knowledge and ingenuity of researchers, community partners, technology providers, and many others working creatively to solve unprecedented challenges.
In the discussion, panelists emphasized the need for more research on several pressing issues: the potential for large-scale, multi-region climate disruptions; improved risk quantification and communication to inform resilience investment tradeoffs; and fundamental reforms to infrastructure governance to align with the challenges of the 21st century. They also agreed that rural and disadvantaged communities are particularly vulnerable to disruptions and require additional planning support and resources.
Looking ahead, the panelists identified several key priorities for policymakers and utilities: developing comprehensive risk assessment tools that capture the full range of wildfire impacts, from infrastructure damage to economic and social disruption; building robust data sharing and knowledge transfer platforms to spread best practices across jurisdictions; and proactively partnering with and providing resources to the most vulnerable communities to co-create resilience solutions. At the same time, they stressed that these near-term imperatives must be accompanied by a more fundamental reevaluation of how we govern and operate infrastructure systems in an era of accelerating complexity and uncertainty.
The webinar underscored that the clean energy transition is not just about deploying low-carbon technologies, but also deliberately designing a power system that is resilient, equitable, and adaptable. With climate impacts already testing the grid, the need for solutions is urgent. The research and regulatory efforts showcased offer promising models for cross-disciplinary problem solving, while also revealing the critical gaps that remain. Bridging those gaps will require even deeper collaboration among stakeholders, creative rethinking of institutional norms, and an unwavering commitment to energy resilience as a public good. As Dr. Callaway put it, “we have to think much more carefully about the balance between cost and risk” and make investments strategically to manage the energy system for resilience. How we rise to this challenge will shape the contours of a livable, equitable future for communities on the frontlines of climate disruption and the clean energy transition.
This webinar was part of a series highlighting environmental and energy research projects funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Check out the event page to view a full recording of the webinar.
