Implementing Equitable Investments in Grid Resilience

Efforts to modernize the grid provide a critical opportunity to integrate new technologies and enhance energy resilience, while also addressing considerations of equity and socioeconomic vulnerability. The high costs of investments in grid resilience are often passed on to ratepayers and must be weighed against the value of future benefits to the public. By explicitly considering and centering equity, utilities and other key players can help to address historic underinvestment, pollution burdens, and the disproportionate climate risk in frontline communities, and can work to minimize or avoid rate increases for lower-income and fixed-income ratepayers. Investments in modern grid technologies, such as advanced microgrids and automated fault isolation and recovery, can substantially decrease climate impacts on society, but investments should also be aimed at minimizing the cost burdens on frontline communities while achieving energy resilience.

Modernization strategies should be designed to support collaboration among all key decisionmaking partners. Strategies should address multiple goals, which can include improving access to low-carbon and resilient energy for all communities, enhancing hard, soft, and natural infrastructure, and embedding principles of equitable, just climate resilience into all levels of decisionmaking. Strategies can be required by utility commissions (see e.g., Electric Program Investment Charge case study) or led by a utility on its own initiative (see e.g., Modernizing the Energy Delivery System for Increased Sustainability case study).

Considerations of Equitable Investments in Grid Resilience

Lessons Learned

• Active investments in grid resilience are currently a priority amongst many practitioners in the energy systems space as climate change impacts increase for all.
• With energy being such an essential resource, integrating clean energy and renewables to reduce energy costs and creating new streams of income and tax revenues would be a win-win for all parties involved.
• Priority investments should be directed to areas facing the greatest socioeconomic risks from outages.
• Utilities should host diverse, transparent, and inclusive engagement processes and specifically reach out to frontline communities to inform decisionmaking about grid modernization investments and any potential rate increases.
• Partners should design equity criteria with careful consideration to ensure that the benefits of investments are equitably distributed to address the needs of customers facing the greatest socioeconomic risk to power outages.