We expect utilities to just work — so much so that we rarely think about them, despite being foundational for every system in our world and life-critical in so many ways. Reliability is the product that utilities deliver, and readiness and resiliency are their core competencies: backups, redundancies, emergency and crisis plans are generally more robust than organisations in other industries.
Nevertheless, we’ve seen that readiness and resiliency increasingly challenged by extreme weather — nearly 80% of power outages today are weather-related. This rising risk is driving massive investments: one report estimates that as much as one-third of all utility investments are going toward resilience and hardening against extreme weather events.
As much as one-third of utilities’ infrastructure investment is going toward resilience and hardening against extreme weather. But even as utilities strengthen their weather readiness and response, other risks are gaining ground. The urgent focus on extreme weather can overshadow threats that are just as capable of compounding a crisis, from workforce risks to chemical safety risks.
This hints at perhaps the greatest danger: the commonly siloed approach to risk. Extreme weather risk bleeds into other risk categories — amplifying those workforce and chemical risks, for example, where a safety incident will now inevitably be worsened by extreme weather risk. Utilities cannot afford to ignore the realities of how cascading risk creates cascading impacts.
Challenge your thinking:
As utilities invest more heavily in extreme weather readiness and resilience, are they reducing overall risk — or simply becoming more vulnerable to the risks they aren’t watching and trading one risk for another?
Extreme weather is rewriting the rules of readiness
Utilities have always planned for extreme weather — such as storms, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, ice events and heatwaves. But the nature of weather risk itself is changing.
Three distinct trends are making extreme weather readiness more difficult:
New extremes in unexpected places: Readiness and resilience strategies in most utility providers were built around predictable weather patterns and familiar sets of extreme weather events. But utilities are increasingly facing conditions with limited local precedent, from extreme cold or heat in areas unaccustomed to prolonged temperature swings (such as the Texas deep freeze of 2021) to wildfires and severe flooding in regions with little historical exposure. These new extremes require entirely new readiness and resilience plans.
More extreme extremes: Utilities may be well-prepared for the events they expect, but those events are stretching the definition of extreme. Stronger storms, more intense heat and cold, and weather events that last weeks instead of days can push existing plans beyond their original assumptions and create new levels of risk and potential impacts.
More frequent or overlapping extremes: Resilience plans have often assumed a recovery window between incidents. That assumption is becoming harder to rely on. Utilities may now face several extreme weather events in a season, sometimes before assets, systems and crews have fully recovered from the last one. Extreme temperatures can also act as a multiplier, adding pressure to operations that may already be strained.
The overall takeaway is that these are no longer “Black Swan” events. The “100-year flood” may hit three times in a decade; tornadoes may touch down far from Tornado Alley, and utilities may face extreme heat and extreme cold in the same year (or season).
Given this new reality, extreme weather readiness can’t afford to be a set-it-and-forget-it practice. Utilities need to be looking at the data, recognising the trends and updating and expanding readiness and resilience before the extreme gets more extreme.
Challenge your thinking:
Are today’s extreme weather readiness plans built for the risks utilities face today, or the risks they faced 20-30 years ago? Join the live debate on 30 July.
Infrastructure is overshadowing human-factor risk
All the attention on extreme weather is warranted, but also inherently threatens to dangerously divert attention and resources away from other areas of risk for utilities. Case in point, while most focus is on risk to infrastructure and assets (power lines, substations, water systems, transmission infrastructure), the human factors are frequently overlooked or under-appreciated.
Utilities depend on thousands of workers (line engineers, field crews, inspectors, contractors) who perform critical activities under difficult, hazardous conditions. Fatigue, communication breakdowns, training gaps, heat stress and contractor coordination issues — the human-factor risks are less obvious than a hurricane or flood, and they develop more slowly. But that silent quality allows them to build into big problems.
Lone workers present a particularly challenging set of risks for utilities. The enormous scale of most utilities’ service areas means that they rely heavily on individuals working independently, often remotely, and almost always exposed to environmental conditions. Visibility and communication are the omnipresent challenges with lone workers, and they go both ways: it’s hard to recognise when a lone worker issue occurs, and it’s hard to communicate and coordinate response with lone workers when an issue occurs elsewhere in operations. Extreme weather only amplifies these lone worker risks, exposing them to more dangerous conditions, more operational pressure, longer shifts, and greater fatigue.
Layered onto all of this risk is the “silver tsunami” affecting the entire workforce. Utilities (like organisations in every sector) are struggling to replace experienced workers rapidly exiting the workforce.
The reality on the ground and in the field is that many utilities are contending with workers that have less experience, less training and less institutional knowledge — all leading to increased human-factor risks.
Challenge your thinking:
If resilience ultimately depends on people, why do infrastructure resilience investments often receive more attention than workforce resilience investments?
Utilities have a chemical safety blind spot
The utilities sector includes significant chemical usage — from water and wastewater treatment chemicals to fuel handling and maintenance chemicals, and other hazardous substances used throughout infrastructure operations. But utilities aren’t typically viewed as chemical companies in the same way as manufacturing or industrial processing — and chemical safety is a common blind spot.
That’s a compliance problem, but also an operational disaster waiting to happen: a chemical exposure event can quickly become a significant operational disruption, cascading into a regulatory incident, reputational damage and worse.
Utilities must prioritise chemical safety that goes beyond maintaining documentation, ensuring that documentation is practically available to frontline workers at the exact moment it’s needed.
Challenge your thinking:
Is your chemical safety programme designed to satisfy an auditor — or to support a lone worker standing in front of a hazardous substance?
The real danger is cascading risk
It’s natural that focus in one area may distract from other areas. But as highlighted above, risk is not zero-sum: extreme weather risk can increase at the same time that workforce and chemical risks also increase.
Moreover, utilities cannot afford to treat risk in silos because in the real world, risk cascades:
The same pattern exists across every category of risk. Chemical incidents, workforce issues, infrastructure failures, cybersecurity events and supply chain disruptions all create secondary and tertiary consequences that ripple across operations, increasing both the likelihood and severity of additional incidents.
Utilities are uniquely exposed to this cascading effect because disruptions rarely stop within the organisation — they quickly spread to businesses, hospitals, transportation systems, emergency services and communities that depend on reliable power and water.
This fundamentally changes how utilities should think about readiness. Organisations need to understand how risks influence one another — where they overlap, which combinations create new exposures, how seemingly unrelated issues can compound into major operational incidents. That requires both collecting and connected datasets across different safety, operational, and resilience programmes to see the patterns that would otherwise remain invisible.
Challenge your thinking:
Are utilities still measuring risk by the likelihood of incidents — or by the likelihood that incidents trigger larger chains of consequences?
The next stress test for utilities: Surging demand from the AI boom
For the last several decades, utilities have operated in an environment of relative abundance: simply meeting demand has not been the primary concern — rather, the challenge has been ensuring reliability and optimising cost efficiency (delivering utilities at lower cost to both the organisation and the ratepayer).
Today, exponential growth in energy demand from data centers — driven by the AI revolution — is fundamentally changing market dynamics for utilities. Increasing supply to meet surging demand will be a primary challenge for most utilities, and many are already making big investments to meet future demand, expanding infrastructure and building new capacity, modernising systems, and increasing workforce capacity.
This huge demand growth, and the necessary investments in meeting it, amplify pressure on all aspects of utility operations. More projects, more complexity, and more urgency create more risk to infrastructure, processes, and people.
Challenge your thinking:
Are utilities expanding capacity faster than they’re expanding readiness? Register for the live debate on 30 July as we explore this further.
The future of readiness & resilience is connected
Utilities have always viewed risk differently. Given the criticality of the services they provide, both the stakes and expectations are higher — and utilities have largely met those higher standards with robust readiness and resilience strategies.
Extreme weather is forcing utilities to rethink readiness and resilience. But they can’t allow that urgently necessary focus overshadow or detract from other areas of risk mitigation. Moreover, they cannot make the mistake of treating extreme weather — or any other issue — as a siloed risk.
True readiness requires an understanding of how risks relate, how disruptions spread, and how complex interactions between individual vulnerabilities can add up to more severe consequences that bely the siloed risk.
The organisations best prepared for tomorrow’s disruptions will be those turning connected data into connected intelligence — using insights, trends, and relationships across their operations to identify cascading risk beforeit cascades.
Challenge your thinking:
If the greatest threat to utility resilience is no longer individual risks but the way risks interact, what would it mean to build a resilience strategy around these connections (rather than their individual parts)?
Join the live debate – Is extreme weather the only risk utilities must prepare for?
Extreme weather is putting utility resilience under pressure, but it is not the only risk testing operations. Lone worker safety, chemical exposure, workforce fatigue, and siloed risk management can all create blind spots that escalate quickly when disruption hits.
This live debate asks what changes when utilities look beyond the most visible threats and treat risk as part of a connected operational system. Industry leaders will explore how risks connect, compound and cascade — and what it takes to strengthen readiness before a crisis exposes the gaps.
