Utility Dive – Why microgrids are the key to grid resilience

Across the world, extreme weather events pose an increased risk to public safety by damaging vital infrastructure and evoking widespread power outages. In the U.S., these disasters racked up more than $182 billion in damages in 2024, as wildfires, hurricanes and winter storms wreaked havoc across the nation. Concurrently, rising power demands from industrial activity, computing growth and electrified transit are pushing the grid to capacity. With 95% of utility leaders warning that extreme weather and rising demand will jeopardize grid reliability over the next decade, energy and infrastructure leaders must act now to fortify a more secure, resilient energy future.

Microgrids are a flexible, cost-effective solution to these evolving energy challenges. They empower organizations, communities and municipalities to take greater control of their energy supply through renewable power generation and storage to leverage distributed energy resources at the customer site. Here, they take on flexible roles both in interacting with the utility grid and by providing energy to the host customer when the utility can’t. Microgrids play a crucial role in facilitating energy conservation and decreasing overall emissions by optimizing the amount and timing of customer energy consumption. They not only support sustainability, but importantly, they can also be a key driver in securing our energy future.

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