Search Climate Insights Directory

This guide by RMI defines energy system resilience as a community's ability to maintain critical services during and after extreme weather, distinguishing it from reliability, which refers to day-to-day grid performance. The document outlines the necessity of resilience due to climate volatility, aging infrastructure, and increasing grid strain, while highlighting that vulnerable populations and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are disproportionately affected by outages.

This report by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) outlines a community-based approach to enhancing energy resilience in the Upper Roaring Fork Valley, Colorado, in partnership with Holy Cross Energy (HCE). Following the 2018 Lake Christine Fire, which nearly disabled power to the region, RMI led a five-month stakeholder process to identify and prioritize distributed energy solutions. The report advocates for a shift from traditional grid hardening and isolated backup generators toward integrated distributed energy resources (DERs) that provide both emergency backup ("black sky") and daily operational ("blue sky") value.

This report by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), prepared for Hunter Douglas, evaluates the energy savings potential of insulating honeycomb window shades in U.S. residences. Using EnergyPlus simulations across eight ASHRAE climate zones, the study finds that these shades can significantly reduce heating and cooling energy consumption, improve thermal comfort, and lower peak electricity demand, with existing homes seeing greater benefits than new homes.