Energy Security Through Resource Adequacy: Resources and Regulation to Reinforce Reliability, Resilience, and Reasonable Rates for Customers
Across the country, state utility commissions, consumer advocates, and electric companies (i.e., the three core groups) are under immense pressure. Recognizing that it is non-negotiable, maintaining reliability and ensuring reasonable rates for electric customers has become an increasingly complex task. The complexity stems from several challenges (and some opportunities) as addressed in recent CCIF reports—economic factors, generation fleet changes, the growing power appetite of large load customers, extreme weather and other catastrophic events that bring increased focus on grid resilience, etc.
Energy security is a critical component in ensuring that electric customers continue to receive reliable service at reasonable rates. Thus, the Critical Consumer Issues Forum (CCIF) aims to assist the three core groups in collaboratively exploring the many facets of this important topic in its 2025-2026 series. While the full scope of the dialogue and resulting consensus principles will be developed by participants throughout the year-long process, CCIF expects participants to candidly discuss the following:
- Resources, such as:
- A diverse, dispatchable energy mix including natural gas, renewables, storage, nuclear, etc.;
- Dependable supply chains; and
- A skilled workforce.
- Regulatory and/or broader public policy approaches that:
- Recognize the value of regulation;
- Encourage timely, cost-effective investment in, and deployment of, necessary resources;
- Support flexible demand;
- Facilitate efficient siting and permitting;
- Encourage regional planning;
- Encourage electric company access to, and use of, available federal funding (loans, loan guarantees, infrastructure reinvestment programs, etc.);
- Provide flexibility and durability to account for risks associated with availability and cost of necessary resources, technological capabilities, challenges from stakeholders, etc.;
- Facilitate communication, especially among the three core groups and with customers; and
- Encourage electric company efforts to work with customers in need.
- Market improvements designed to:
- Ensure system operators can prioritize necessary resources and value capacity, energy, flexibility, and grid resilience attributes;
- Support backup plans to timely secure critical resources (where markets fail); and
- Adopt more comprehensive, multi-metric adequacy standards that consider outage frequency, duration, depth, and timing.
- Mitigation of upward pressure on rates, fair allocation of costs, and other customer protections.