Powering Up: Improving Energy Grid Reliability and Resilience to Lower Energy Bills

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a briefing about policy solutions to meet the reliability, resilience, and affordability challenges facing the U.S. energy grid. The grid underpins modern life—enabling economic activity, supporting national security, and powering everything from basic necessities in homes to critical infrastructure like hospitals and transportation. Today, the grid’s stability is being tested like never before. Aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and unprecedented increases in electricity demand could soon overwhelm generation and transmission capacity and outpace states and utility planners. These challenges hit home, from higher energy bills for consumers to rolling blackouts that leave communities vulnerable during heat waves, wildfires, winter storms, and hurricanes.  This briefing outlined policy options and technological innovations to address these challenges. Panelists expanded on several aspects of grid modernization, including the buildout of new transmission lines, bringing online new power generation and energy storage capacity, and improving energy efficiency. They also described the state of permitting reform in the 119th Congress. Attendees left this briefing with a better understanding of the imperatives and multiple benefits of an environmentally and economically sustainable energy grid to power the 21st century.