Accelerating the Transition to Clean, Affordable, Resilient Energy in 2024

The clean energy transition is not a single moment. It is thousands of decisions made by utilities, regulators, technology companies, and policymakers working under real constraints—operational, financial, and political. What moves the industry forward is not consensus on the destination, which is broadly shared, but access to the research, relationships, and tested approaches that make the next decision easier than the last one.

In 2024, SEPA marked 30 years of doing exactly that work. What began as a focused educational nonprofit has grown into an alliance of nearly 1,000 member organizations—spanning utilities, technology companies, public utility commissions, consumer advocates, government offices, and NGOs—united around a common mission. The breadth of that membership is not incidental. It reflects the reality that no single sector owns the transition, and that the most durable solutions emerge when the full range of stakeholders is in the room.

This is SEPA’s 2024 Annual Report—a comprehensive account of the research, convenings, and partnerships SEPA led over the past year across resilience, transportation electrification, energy storage, emerging technology, policy, and energy equity. It documents what SEPA and its members built together and what is now available to the broader industry as a result. For everyone navigating the transition, it is both a record of what SEPA accomplished in 2024 and a resource for the work ahead.

2024 Takeaways

• SEPA published Reimagining Resilience, a framework for integrating customer-sited and grid-scale distributed energy resources that gives utilities, communities, and government agencies a structured path from planning to implementation—addressing a gap the industry was navigating without common guidance.
• By convening working groups across eight topics and mobilizing 350+ member organizations, SEPA helped utilities, cooperatives, national labs, and regulators move from isolated problem-solving to shared, replicable solutions on challenges from microgrid deployment to managed EV charging.
• Through its 15th Executive Fact-Finding Mission, SEPA led a delegation of 20 utility and technology executives to Berlin to study Germany’s Energiewende firsthand—meeting directly with energy ministries, grid operators, and clean energy companies and translating those lessons back to the U.S. market.
• Developed with Toyota Motor North America, EnergyHub, and WeaveGrid, SEPA’s State of Managed Charging in 2024 gave the industry concrete best practices for distribution-level optimization at a moment when EV load growth was already testing utility planning assumptions.
• With 100% of surveyed utility respondents implementing, piloting, or planning a community or customer-focused carbon-reduction program, SEPA responded to member demand by publishing policy research that gave energy leaders a framework for turning those commitments into operational programs.