Better Metrics for Better Energy Decisions

Utilities and regulators are facing a difficult reality: energy affordability pressures are rising while resilience risks are increasing. Grid investment decisions still rely on approaches that clearly capture upfront costs but obscure long-term benefits. Clean energy and resilience investments can reduce pollution, prevent outages, limit economic disruption, and mitigate long-term operational and regulatory risks for the organizations responsible for delivering reliable service. Yet these outcomes remain challenging to quantify, monetize, and defend within traditional decision-making frameworks. As a result, decision-makers often compare clear near-term costs with unclear long-term benefits, leading to misinterpreted costs, underestimated benefits, and decisions informed by incomplete information.

A 2025 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory analysis shows inflation-adjusted retail electricity prices rising in roughly one-third of states between 2019 and 2024, driven by factors including infrastructure replacement, grid hardening, and fuel volatility.

Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, October 2025. Analysis of inflation-adjusted retail electricity prices, utility expenditures, and cost drivers across U.S. states from 2019–2024.

At the same time, affordability and resilience–two of the most frequently cited priorities in the energy transition–remain difficult to define, measure, and consistently value within regulatory processes. The full value of affordability and resilience investments may emerge only over long time horizons or during rare but high-impact events.

From Comprehensive BCA Frameworks to Project-Level Insight

Regulatory benefit-costs analysis (BCA) has evolved through frameworks such as the National Standard Practice Manual (NSPM) for BCA for Distributed Energy Resources, which provides a comprehensive, policy-aligned approach to capturing both utility system impacts, such as reliability and resilience, and broader societal impacts, including affordability, public health, and economic development, in alignment with state energy policy goals. Complementary methods, including health impact assessments and avoided-emissions valuation, have further translated these outcomes into clean metrics that regulators can consider alongside traditional cost data.

A key challenge remains at the project level. While these frameworks define which impacts matter, decision-makers still lack reliable, localized metrics to quantify and monetize them in regulatory proceedings. Without consistent project-specific evidence, long-term benefits remain uncertain, and decisions may continue to weigh immediate costs against benefits that are only partially measured.

Emerging analytical platforms are beginning to address this gap. Tools such as Quantum Energy’s TotalView Energy Platform use hourly grid simulations with integrated life-cycle assessment to model how individual projects affect grid operations and emissions, translating those changes into public-health, environmental, and economic impacts. Rather than replacing traditional BCA, this analysis converts policy-recognized benefits into decision-ready evidence, operationalizing the NSPM’s vision.

To illustrate the scale of potential impacts, Quantum analyzed wind and solar projects in U.S. development queues using TotalView. The analysis quantified avoided pollution and associated public health, ecosystem, and economic benefits if these projects are developed. In their first year of operation, the pollution reductions expected from the 1,061 projects are estimated to save 215,000 disability-adjusted life years (equivalent to 100,000 people getting an extra 2.1 years of life with their families), 461 local species, and over $57 billion in economic savings.

(Source: Quantum Energy)

Evidence in Practice: The Vista Sands Solar Project

The 1.3-GW Vista Sands Solar project in Wisconsin, approved by the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin in late 2024 and currently under development, illustrates how this type of analysis can influence real-world decision-making. Facing significant public opposition and the possibility of reduced capacity, regulators were asked to determine whether the project’s full scale was justified.

To inform the proceeding, developer Doral Renewables partnered with Quantum Energy to conduct a project-specific impact assessment using the TotalView platform. The analysis quantified avoided pollution, public health benefits, ecosystem impacts, and the associated economic value, specific to the project’s location, capacity, technology, and expected generation. These findings were submitted to the Commission and helped clarify both the societal value of maintaining full capacity and the underlying business case, including improved project profitability and return on investment.

Measurement Makes Human Health, Biodiversity, and Economic Benefits Visible

(Source: Quantum Energy)

With this evidence, regulators had defensible, project-specific information to support approval of the project at full scale, demonstrating how clearer measurement of avoided harm can shape regulatory outcomes.

The Missing Link in Resilience Planning

Resilience planning today is at an inflection point, much like clean energy planning was a decade ago. Investments in grid hardening and faster recovery are often capital-intensive and justified primarily by avoided harm, yet evaluated using metrics that do not capture their full value. As a result, avoided outages, reduced economic disruption, and improved public safety remain difficult to measure and prioritize within existing regulatory frameworks.

Resilience reflects how the grid performs during major events or extreme conditions. Yet conventional reliability metrics such as SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI measure performance during normal operating conditions and often exclude major event days. Many states tie these metrics to reporting requirements and performance incentives, creating strong oversight of day-to-day reliability but far fewer defined expectations for system performance during severe disruptions. As a result, outage impacts, restoration performance, and broader economic and public-safety consequences during extreme events remain difficult to measure and prioritize. Outcome-based resilience metrics help close this gap by providing a clearer way to evaluate performance when the grid is under stress, making the cost of inaction more visible in investment decisions.

Clean energy planning offers a clear lesson: when outcomes become measurable, they become actionable. Just as expanded BCA frameworks helped translate environmental, health, and economic impacts into decision-relevant terms, resilience now requires outcome-based metrics that capture system performance during extreme events and the broader social impacts of grid operation.

SEPA’s Beyond the Baseline resilience metrics framework, developed with Baringa, reflects this next step. By focusing on both resistance (preventing or minimizing outages) and recovery (restoration time), it evaluates how the grid performs when it matters most. Rather than replacing traditional reliability metrics, it builds on existing utility data to translate resilience into measurable performance and clearer support for performance-based regulation and incentives.

Source: SEPA and Baringa, 2025.  MY SAIFI includes all outages averaged over a 4 to 7-year rolling window to reduce interannual volatility. MERT tracks how quickly utilities restore service to 95% of customers after a major event, with targets scaled to event severity.

When clean and resilient energy outcomes are not fully measured, their value is underestimated, and the cost of inaction is ultimately borne by households, businesses, and communities.

A Clearer Path Forward

The evolution of BCAs demonstrates that better measurement strengthens existing decision-making frameworks. Methodologies such as the NSPM for DERs expanded the scope of what should be valued, while project-level analysis, including tools like Quantum Energy’s TotalView, helps quantify those values in practice. Outcome-based resilience metrics like MY SAIFI and MERT extend this progress by bringing greater clarity to reliability and resilience outcomes.

The opportunity ahead is twofold. Utilities and regulators can advance project-specific analysis that complements traditional system-wide evaluation and clarifies how investment costs translate into real-world benefits. They can also apply outcome-based measurement to resilience planning so that outage prevention, recovery performance, and system behavior during extreme events are visible and defensible within regulatory processes. When outcomes are measurable, decisions become clearer, and investments can better reflect the full value they create.

For more information on state-level impacts of clean energy projects in the development pipeline, see: https://quantum-ec.com/state-benefits/

Project-level data is available to SEPA members by contacting: [email protected]