Utility Capital Investment Planning: Reach Beyond Reliability to Climate Resilience

Throughout the history of the utility industry, decisions about where and when to invest have been largely driven by the need to provide safe, reliable, and affordable energy to all customers. Future environmental considerations were generally assumed to be fairly stable. However, the impacts of climate change are growing, with increasingly severe floods, wildfires, and hurricanes demanding that utilities react.

Addressing these infrastructure threats requires increased investment. Fortunately, new asset investment planning software solutions can help utilities take a hard, clear look at climate-related risks and the opportunities to address them. Such solutions leverage a value framework to help utilities make a rigorously fair comparison of different paths to climate resilience

This playbook explores three ways that asset investment planning software can support highly effective capital planning to achieve utility climate resilience:

• Keeping critical assets safe
• Transparency for climate resilience decisions
• Valuing future innovation and development