Advancing the Energy System of the Future: Progress, Innovation, and Collaboration in 2025

Data centers are landing on distribution systems not designed for them. EV load is arriving faster than managed charging standards. Wildfire risk is outpacing utility planning cycles. These are not emerging challenges, they are the conditions under which the industry is making decisions that will define the grid for decades. SEPA exists to ensure those decisions are informed by the best available research and the earned experience of peers who have already been there.

This is SEPA’s 2025 Annual Report, a comprehensive account of the research, convenings, and partnerships SEPA led over the past year to move the industry forward. It documents what SEPA and its nearly 1,000 member organizations built together across grid modernization, demand growth, resilience, electrification, and global knowledge exchange, and what is now available to the broader industry as a result. For utilities, regulators, technology companies, and policymakers navigating the transition, it is both a record of what SEPA accomplished in 2025 and a resource for the work ahead.

2025 Takeaways

• SEPA launched DELTa, a first-of-its-kind database of large-load tariffs that was cited in seven state and federal regulatory dockets within months, giving regulators a common framework for decisions they were already making without one.
• By convening ten utilities around a shared challenge, SEPA helped expedite interconnection guidance for bidirectional EV charging that is now available to the broader industry as a replicable standard.
• Through its 16th Executive Fact-Finding Mission, SEPA led a delegation of 20 utility and technology executives to Portugal months after a historic blackout struck the Iberian Peninsula—meeting directly with the grid operators, policymakers, and institutions navigating the aftermath and translating those firsthand lessons for the U.S. market.
• With more than 500 utility professionals participating, SEPA’s wildfire mitigation webinar series equipped the industry with concrete strategies for protecting grid infrastructure in the face of increasingly severe fire conditions.
• At NARUC’s annual meeting, SEPA and Amazon Web Services put commissioners and AI researchers in the same room to work through what machine learning means for grid operations in practice.