A Reliable Grid for an Electric Future: NEMA’s Grid Reliability Study

America’s electrical system faces dramatic changes over next 25 years:
– Increased Demand Electricity: demand will grow by more than 50%
– New Policies: Critical new policies and regulatory certainty are needed to deliver a flexible, stable, more resilient grid
– Urgent need to invest in technologies to meet coming demand in an all-ofthe-above energy ecosystem: Transmit more over existing lines by improving efficiency and utilizing smart grid technology…

Grid Reliability In The Clean Energy Transition

Electricity demand is rising, although how much and how fast remains an open question. But new data centers, increased domestic manufacturing, and the electrification of buildings, transportation, and industry means we need more electricity at a time when fossil plants are retiring. Likewise, we need to reimagine how to run a clean system while updating outdated equipment – 70 percent of transmission lines and transformers are at least 30 years old.

New Energy Innovation research walks through the basics of grid reliability and explains why clean energy helps keep the lights on. Yet grid operators, reliability authorities, and utilities are …

A Review of Examples and Opportunities to Quantify the Grid Reliability and Resilience Impacts of Energy Efficiency

Grid reliability and resilience are foundational to meeting electricity needs and have significant economic and societal impacts. Energy efficiency can help meet grid reliability objectives and improve resilience, but metrics and methods used today may not fully recognize these benefits. This paper explains how existing planning processes for bulk power and distribution systems capture the impact of energy efficiency on power system reliability and resilience, with illustrative examples. We identify limitations in using existing reliability and resilience metrics to quantify efficiency and other distributed energy resource (DER) benefits. The paper concludes with opportunities for regulators and utilities to enhance planning …

Leveraging Rail-Based Mobile Energy Storage to Increase Grid Reliability in the Face of Climate Uncertainty

This paper examine the potential to use the US rail system as a nationwide backup transmission grid over which containerized batteries, or rail-based mobile energy storage (RMES), are shared among regions to meet demand peaks, relieve transmission congestion and increase resilience. We find that RMES is a feasible reliability solution for low-frequency, high-impact events and quantify its cost effectiveness relative to reliability-driven investments in transmission infrastructure and stationary capacity. Compared to new transmission lines and stationary battery capacity, deploying RMES for such events could save the power sector upwards of US$300 per kW-year and US$85 per kW-year, respectively. While no …

A Review of Examples and Opportunities to Quantify the Grid Reliability and Resilience Impacts of Energy Efficiency

Grid reliability and resilience are foundational to meeting electricity needs and have significant economic and societal impacts. Energy efficiency can help meet grid reliability objectives and improve resilience, but metrics and methods used today may not fully recognize these benefits. This paper explains how existing planning processes for bulk power and distribution systems capture the impact of energy efficiency on power system reliability and resilience, with illustrative examples. We identify limitations in using existing reliability and resilience metrics to quantify efficiency and other distributed energy resource (DER) benefits. The paper concludes with opportunities for regulators and utilities to enhance planning …

Future-Proof AI Data Centers, Grid Reliability, and Affordable Energy: Recommendations for States

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming industries, but its rapid expansion is already causing a significant increase in electricity demand. Data centers that support AI model training and inference require immense computational power, putting pressure on the electric grid and raising concerns about sustainability, energy costs, and reliability. Recent projections suggest that AI-driven data centers could consume up to 9% of U.S. electricity by 2030 (equivalent to the electricity needed to power 20–40% of today’s vehicles if they were EVs), highlighting the need for policies that ensure energy-efficient, socially responsible, and environmentally sustainable development.

The emergence of DeepSeek, a highly efficient …

Clean Hydrogen and Grid Reliability

As states strive to reduce emissions while ensuring a reliable and resilient electric sector, clean hydrogen has emerged as a potential solution, particularly in applications such as long-duration energy storage (LDES) and microgrids. With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) playing pivotal roles in stimulating investment in scaled hydrogen production and use across the United States, states have a plethora of use cases to consider for clean hydrogen. The IIJA allocates funds specifically for creating regional clean hydrogen hubs and enhancing hydrogen production, processing, delivery, and end-use. Complementarily, the IRA offers tax credits …

The Key to Electric Grid Reliability: Modernizing Governance

The U.S. electric grid is under strain, with blackouts on the rise and the system’s reliability more frequently tested than ever before in the face of more frequent storms, heat waves, hurricanes, and the like. In diagnosing the causes of diminishing grid reliability, policymakers and experts have pointed to aging grid infrastructure, growing cyber threats, more natural disasters and weather extremes, and overreliance on renewable energy—such as solar and wind.
This white paper argues that the primary cause of our unreliable grid is not the changing energy mix but rather a failure of grid governance. The grid governance system consists …

Capturing the Reliability Benefits of Grid-Forming Batteries

Implementing grid-forming (GFM) controls on new battery storage systems has the potential to increase grid reliability at low cost. As of 2021, interconnection queues in the United States contained an estimated 427 GW of battery storage capacity that, in the absence of incentives or requirements for GFM controls, will be built with conventional grid-following (GFL) controls. Some of these batteries will be deployed in weak grid areas already dominated by GFL inverter-based resources (IBRs) (wind, solar, and battery storage). Power export capability from these areas may already be limited due to stability concerns, and the integration of additional GFL IBRs …

Energy Storage for Winter Grid Reliability: How Batteries Became the Low-Cost Solution for Power Assurance in Massachusetts

Winter electric peaking capacity (called “winter reliability” in New England) provides an important value
to the electric grid by helping to avoid winter blackouts. As heating and transportation are increasingly
electrified to meet climate goals, winter peak energy needs will grow; and as fossil–fueled generators are
phased out due to emissions caps, new, clean sources of winter peaking capacity will need to be found.

Although winter peaking capacity has traditionally been provided by gas and oil peaking generators
(peaker plants), it can also be provided by cleaner, “behind–the–meter” customer …