Environmental

This panel at the 2025 NARUC Summer Policy Summit explored competing policy demands. On the panel were moderator and NARUC Senior Director Kim Duffley, ISO New England CEO Gordon van Welie, District of Columbia Commission Chair Emile Thompson, Northeast Power Coordinating Council CEO Charles Dickerson, Avangrid Networks CEO Joe Purington, GT Power Group President Glen Thomas, and Copper Monarch Principal Vincent Duane.

Extreme weather events can devastate utility infrastructure. This panel on Weathering the Storm (Resilience and Extreme Weather) discussed resilient, cost-effective strategies for safeguarding energy systems while exploring critical questions on responsibility and costs in the face of extreme weather.

“We have identified which system structures and components could be impacted by climate change. We’ve gone a step further to assess them against the design margins to understand what we need to focus on and plan for in the next 30 or more years. The product is a first-of-a-kind assessment that could be used for any nuclear power plant.”

“If you’re looking at 30-year investments and have to decide now whether to invest in them, even 10 years from now, we can’t predict what reliability needs are going to be to trigger a reliability relief valve. If I heard you correctly, you’re fundamentally rethinking that approach.”

“There was a lot of focus post-Storm Uri on generation performance, and ERCOT made some improvements through some higher technical standards, although we must see how it performs. But no one has addressed the demand side at all. That’s one of the problems.”

“Since Arkansas has a vertically integrated market, there needs to be a regulatory proceeding with the PUC where the tariff is created. We want to make sure it’s going to meet the objective of the federal government in ensuring we are bringing in new carbon pollution-free electricity to meet that fifty percent 24/7 goal.”

Enacting the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act equitably: “Integrating equitable outcomes as a central driver of our efforts was a conscious choice borne from a recognition that many past actions to develop energy infrastructure in use today didn’t prioritize equity and the resulting environmental impacts on communities.”

“Climate READi could inform generation siting decisions that the state might make. It also will inform the kind of upgrades and improvements that are going to be required of generating facilities if you take into consideration the long-term effects of climate change.”

“If we are going to do this, it must be equitable, ensure reliability and resiliency, and it has to be affordable. The point of our work is to figure out what that means, decide what kinds of policies to get there, and how long is this going to take.”

“Green hydrogen is exciting because it gets to that storage issue in terms of potentially having ability to store excess renewable energy from sources like solar and wind for electricity.”