Strategy & Planning

“California needs to know whether electric vehicle supply equipment projects are coming online at a fast enough pace in appropriate locations to meet forecasted charging demand. Only then will the CPUC understand whether timeline targets it established will enable California to achieve its electrification goals.”

“Resilience planning means thinking ahead and contemplating as many unknowns as you can. As a utility regulator, you must consider thwarting opportunities and vulnerabilities that storms might give bad actors to infiltrate operating systems.”

“The choice of cost allocation method is both a key factor in shaping outcomes and an exercise in judgment. No single standard defines what makes one approach reasonable and another flawed.”

“While some tweaks are necessary due to the present speed and concentration of load additions, wholesale jettisoning of tested practices likely brings many unintended consequences even – or perhaps, especially – for those customers regulators are seeking to protect.”

“This article presents a high-level overview of emerging regulatory innovations, focusing on the intersection between tariff design and integrated planning. Other articles in this series will present views on additional innovations underway as load growth reshapes the electricity landscape.”

“We, working with Southern Nuclear and other partners, effectively built a new construction platform that the new Team Vogtle used to then build the plant. The tools we helped them select and implement for this platform were the same tools they use in operations. There were two big advantages.”

“Utilities are pushing more obligations and responsibilities onto hyperscalers to avoid putting a burden on other customers. For example, we have seen a tech firm develop a transmission line it owns in the northwest U.S.”

“The most surprising is how many times we heard how much the utilities require regulatory stability to meet their goals. They are looking for predictability. However, it’s essential they make resilience a permanent capability to prepare and turn disruption into opportunity.”

“We’re seeing annual growth rates of between 13-16% nationally from data center power year-over-year between now and the year 2030. Data centers constituted about 5% of total U.S. demand in 2024, for comparison. That’ll increase to between 16-23% percent by 2033.”

“We’re fortunate being a global company on the supply chain side. Being part of the Iberdrola family in AVANGRID, it speeds up our wait time to 2 to 3 years. Where we had impacts from COVID in the U.S. on distribution transformers, we were able to take manufacturing slots from Brazil.”