Keeping Everyone’s Lights On

The report examines the vulnerabilities of the US power grid to climate change, highlighting how extreme heat, wildfires, winter storms, and hurricanes cause widespread outages. It argues that current planning focuses on reliability under typical conditions rather than resilience to high-impact, low-frequency events. The authors emphasize that structural inequities, such as the legacy of redlining, leave low-income communities and people of color disproportionately vulnerable to the life-threatening consequences of power loss. The document recommends that regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) adopt forward-looking climate risk assessments, integrate energy justice principles, and reform economic metrics like the Value of Lost Load (VOLL) to prioritize human vulnerability over economic activity.

• Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of weather-related power outages in the US; between 2000 and 2020, such outages increased by 67 percent.
• There is a critical distinction between grid reliability, which manages routine uncertainty, and resilience, which is the ability to anticipate, prepare for, withstand, and recover from 'high-impact, low-frequency' (HILF) events.
• Regional and interregional transmission is essential for resilience because it provides redundancy and allows utilities to share generating resources across large geographic areas during extreme weather.
• Structural inequities, specifically the history of redlining and exclusionary zoning, have created a legacy of disinvestment that leaves marginalized communities with aging infrastructure and higher energy burdens, making them more vulnerable to outages.
• Power restoration is frequently prioritized based on economic activity rather than human vulnerability, which prolongs outages in lower-income areas.
• The 'value of lost load' (VOLL) metric used by system planners is biased because it relies on a customer's 'willingness to pay,' which reflects financial capacity rather than actual vulnerability to power loss.
• Federal efforts to improve resilience are insufficient; FERC's Order 1920 requires the study of future needs but does not mandate the construction of resilient infrastructure, and Order No. 896 focuses on historical rather than projected climate data.
• State-level resilience planning is inconsistent, with only 14 states and the city of New Orleans requiring electric utilities to file resilience plans.
• Regional transmission planning is often inadequate; a report by Americans for a Clean Energy Grid found that six of ten regions scored a D+ or worse on deploying robust planning methods for future uncertainty.

APA

Gomberg, S., Licker, R., Sathia, S., & Worth, P. (2025). Keeping Everyone’s Lights On. Union of Concerned Scientists. https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/Keeping-Everyones-Lights-On-Full-Report.pdf

Chicago

Gomberg, Sam, Rachel Licker, Sital Sathia, and Pamela Worth. Keeping Everyone’s Lights On. Union of Concerned Scientists, 2025. https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/Keeping-Everyones-Lights-On-Full-Report.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Gomberg |first1=Sam |last2=Licker |first2=Rachel |last3=Sathia |first3=Sital |last4=Worth |first4=Pamela |title=Keeping Everyone’s Lights On |publisher=Union of Concerned Scientists |date=June 2025 |url=https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/Keeping-Everyones-Lights-On-Full-Report.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{gomberg2025keeping, author = {Gomberg, Sam and Licker, Rachel and Sathia, Sital and Worth, Pamela}, title = {{Keeping Everyone’s Lights On}}, institution = {Union of Concerned Scientists}, year = {2025}, month = jun, url = {https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/Keeping-Everyones-Lights-On-Full-Report.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }