Inside the resilience gap — SkimNews
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- 2026 State of Grid Resilience — a Zpryme survey of 141 utility and energy professionals across North America, conducted for S&C Electric Company from June to August 2026, found three in four respondents see operational risk as higher than five years ago, and more than half expect distribution load growth to be very or extremely significant over the next decade.
- Affordability and customer rate pressure are the biggest barrier to accelerating resilience investment for 61% of respondents, more than three times the share citing competing capital priorities; nearly four in five expect resilience investment to rise over the next five years, and 79% are confident their current trajectory will meaningfully improve resilience within five years.
- Reliability metrics are losing ground to their own criteria: only 48% of respondents say current metrics adequately capture performance during major disruptive events, SAIDI and customer outage frequency remain the most-cited inputs to investment decisions, and only 17% cite resilience-specific measures such as extreme-event recovery and adaptive capacity.
- The distribution grid draws 58% of respondents' attribution for where customer-impacting outages originate, aligning with U.S. Department of Energy research finding more than 90% of electric power interruptions start there; 53% identify distribution as offering the greatest opportunity to improve outage outcomes over the next decade.
- FLISR and distribution automation rank highest for resilience return but remain largely undeployed — fully deployed at 18% and 12% of respondents' utilities respectively, against 33% for automated switches and reclosers — with expected five-year spending growth concentrated in automation, FLISR, undergrounding and pole and wire hardening.
- Anders Sjoelin, president and CEO of S&C Electric Company, said utilities are being asked to strengthen resilience in an increasingly challenging operating environment, with rising electricity dependence and demand alongside affordability constraints, and pointed to distribution investments that limit customer impact and restore power faster.
- The resilience value case rests largely on service quality: nearly nine in ten respondents justify resilience investments through service quality and reliability, alone or combined with cost avoidance, and 47% use both cost avoidance and reliability improvement — a case the research says better disruption measures can strengthen.
Why it matters: Utilities and regulators have a measurement mismatch: 61% name affordability as the top barrier to resilience investment, yet only 17% use resilience-specific measures, so capital keeps following SAIDI-style everyday reliability rather than the distribution automation utilities say restores service fastest after major storms.
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