Research

SEPA and NRECA Resilience Planning Playbook for Electric Cooperative Utilities

This report explores key factors driving electric cooperative utilities to incorporate advanced resilience planning and includes representative case studies.
Member engagement, strategic partnerships, and funding are crucial to facilitate resilience planning for electric cooperative utilities.
The playbook includes examples of data and system integration to enable resilience planning.
Utilities can enhance resilience through both traditional and non-traditional solutions.

Electric cooperatives (co-ops) across the U.S. are navigating an evolving energy landscape shaped by increased electrification, the adoption of distributed energy resources, policy-driven decarbonization goals, and the growing impact of extreme weather events. Recognizing the evolving energy landscape, SEPA and NRECA developed the Resilience Planning Playbook for Electric Cooperative Utilities as a resource for other electric cooperatives to navigate new approaches to resilience planning.

This report includes case studies, best practices, and real-world insights from cooperative utilities developed through a workshop and several interviews. This report focuses on the resilience planning approach identified in SEPA’s Resilience Planning Playbook for States and Utilities for electric cooperative utilities. It includes summaries of their approaches to engaging with their members and communities on resilience planning, how they measure reliability and use resilience metrics, and the data they collect to support these efforts.

Authors:

Jared Leader, Senior Director, Resilience, SEPA
Mac Keller, Manager, Resilience, SEPA
Weston Dengler, Senior Analyst, Research & Industry Strategy, SEPA
Allison Hamilton, Director, Business & Technology Strategies, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association