Public power communities across the U.S. are making investments in resiliency to counter threats to safety, grid security, and electricity reliability. Just as each public power community has distinct priorities, each also faces a litany of distinct threats that could hamper how communities are served. Whether needing to address changing climate or natural forces, uncertainty in the costs and procurement of energy, or new patterns of energy use from increased technology adoption, public power providers are meeting specific resiliency needs with dedication and ingenuity.
Countering Risks
Serving more than 320,000 city residents and a network of educational institutions that encompasses nearly 40 grade schools and the University of California at Riverside campus, Riverside Public Utilities is one of the larger public power utilities in California. Like many municipalities in the state, Riverside faces the potential for major risk to grid security from earthquakes, increasingly severe heatwaves, and wildfires.
Scott Lesch, assistant general manager of Riverside’s Power Resources Division, and Daniel Honeyfield, assistant general manager of Riverside’s Energy Delivery Division, have overseen the simultaneous modernization and hardening of the local grid. This has taken the form of large-scale initiatives that aim to address Riverside’s resiliency needs — both in terms of its infrastructure particularities and in mitigating the stressors posed by earthquakes and rising heat.
Notable among these is the Riverside Transmission Reliability Project, or RTRP, that is building a second point of connection to the California Independent System Operator. Among other benefits, adding a second connection point could mitigate potential power loss in Riverside’s service area if the first point of interconnection was to fail. According to Lesch, Riverside is the largest city in the state that currently has only one point of interconnection to CAISO.
While the RTRP is augmenting Riverside’s transmission security, the utility is also working to ensure power supply and substations are reinforced to prevent blackouts during peak summer demand. With Southern California’s heatwaves becoming more intense and prolonged, Riverside’s customers are requiring more power to keep themselves cool during these warmer months.
“We’ve been lining up internal gas-fired generation in summer to meet our peak loads. We’ve also been improving our kV subtransmission system over the last five years, putting in additional lines so if we lose one line we don’t have a distribution level blackout. We’re also upgrading several substations and building a replacement substation in our industrial area,” Lesch said.
Riverside has paired these infrastructure reinforcements with wildfire mitigation. While Riverside was spared the more intense blazes that destroyed other communities in Southern California in early 2025, the public power utility is preparing to keep its customers and power grid safe from similar incidents by implementing fire mitigation strategies.
“We first submitted a wildfire mitigation plan back in 2021. We’re fortunate here in Riverside that only about 15% of our service territory would be classified as a Tier 2 fire risk. What our engineers and distribution teams have been doing is focusing on those areas, improving distribution infrastructure through installing Cal Fire-approved fuses so we don’t get arcs that can start fires,” Lesch said.
The utility has also engaged in tabletop exercises to plan their response to earthquakes and heat storms — heatwaves that persist unbroken for three or more days — that could affect a greater number of customers than wildfires.
“The City of Riverside received a federal grant to do a tabletop exercise for how to deal with an extended heat storm event. We’ll be participating in that at the Riverside Emergency Operations Center and then putting out a written report — kind of lessons learned — that will be a public document,” Lesch said.
Lessons from these exercises are informing the utility’s resiliency plan, one that is focused on advancing grid security while eliminating carbon output.
“Both the utility and the city are undertaking a new 25-year strategic plan looking toward 2050 about how the city is going to become more sustainable and more resilient, while trying to completely decarbonize,” Lesch said.
Reducing Dependence
King Cove, a fishing town near the western end of the Alaskan Peninsula, has built resilience through investment in renewable energy. As a remote area without quick access to larger settlements, King Cove residents require shipments of goods and fuel to keep themselves supplied. These shipments are often by nautical transit due to the lack of roads to the mainland.
While the community was incorporated in 1949, the Indigenous Aleuts who constitute a plurality of the town’s residents have lived throughout the region for millennia. King Cove’s remote location and lack of connection to a broader electrical grid meant the town was reliant on diesel generation for electricity through the early 1990s. The fuel that powered its diesel plant was brought in by sea, leaving the price of electricity tied to the oil market and the town’s energy dependent on outside supplies.
Gary Hennigh has been King Cove’s city administrator since 1989. The start of Hennigh’s tenure coincided with a
push to develop renewable energy that would allow the town to develop more affordable power. While the nearby Delta Creek Valley was identified as a potential source of hydropower in the 1970s, building renewable generation wasn’t formally proposed until a December 1989 city council meeting — the first one Hennigh attended.
“My first day on the job involved being told King Cove has got this great hydropower potential that the Army Corps of Engineers identified back in the early ’70s, and then the Alaska Energy Authority became aware of it as well,” Hennigh said.
King Cove’s development of a local grid — one whose affordable, reliable power has supported its fishing industry and improved the town’s quality of life — has been a decades-long process.
“After getting some funding from USDA and state grants, we were ready to move forward. By 1992, we had hired a contractor to come out and build the project, and, by December 1993, Delta Creek was brought online. From 1993 through 2017, we were 50% renewable just on the strength of what Delta Creek was bringing us,” Hennigh said.
The success of King Cove’s Delta Creek facility laid the groundwork for the development of the subsequent Waterfall Creek plant, which began operating in 2017.
“The process of bringing Waterfall Creek online got on a fast track because we were able to say what hydropower has done for us during the first 15-plus years, and we think this can only make our generation stronger,” Hennigh said.
Since Waterfall Creek was brought online, King Cove’s annual electric generation has been 85% renewable. Having local hydropower has saved the city from purchasing 4 million gallons of diesel — translating to $6 million in cost savings, substantially reducing its carbon emissions, and lowering residents’ electric bills by an average of $1,000 annually.
This transition toward renewables, paired with its underground power lines, has made King Cove a standout among Alaskan public power communities — an achievement that was recognized through the town receiving the Best Practice for Community Renewable Energy Independence at the 2017 Helsinki Arctic Energy Summit.
While Hennigh recognizes there is work ahead to build further resilience against climate stressors and seismic activity, he is proud of the work King Cove Municipal Electric has done to build a stable local grid that provides its customers with affordable power.
“I love to tell people in urban Alaska that if everything comes together the way it has the potential to, that little King Cove out on the end of the planet could have the cheapest unsubsidized kilowatt cost anywhere in Alaska,” Hennigh said.
Resilience Today and Tomorrow
Colorado’s Platte River Power Authority serves the cities of Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont, and Loveland, which together provide power to over 156,000 residential and 20,000 commercial customers. The communities Platte River serves are interested in sustainability, and the joint action agency’s resilience work is tied closely to climate response.
Much of this work pairs with the agency’s 2024 Integrated Resource Plan, which aims to ensure Platte River’s generation is both reliable and environmentally sustainable — paving the way for electrification, electric vehicle adoption, and decarbonization while ensuring affordability.
“Our customers are tech-savvy and more excited about adopting new technologies. There’s a lot of EVs in our service territory and a lot of solar,” said Zach Borton, distributed energy resource services manager at Platte River.
As a backbone of its grid stability, Platte River has focused on ensuring all parts of its system, including transformers and breakers, are ready to meet the demands of load growth from electrification and a rising population. Utilities nationwide are contending with the cost pressures of incorporating new technologies, and Platte River has endeavored to mitigate these while transitioning its energy portfolio.
“We have made significant investment to migrate from old oil-type breakers to brand-new SF6 breakers. We’ve had a significant amount of capital investment over the last 15 years to ensure not only can we meet what we need today, but we can meet future load growth as well,” Darren said.
The agency is also investing in batteries that can store excess generation from renewables and provide power as needed, whether during times of lower solar and wind output or when grid stressors temporarily cut other generation.
“Every one of our owner communities will get a battery that adds up to around 5 and 20 MW each, which will help them on the resiliency and increased load side of things,” Borton said.
Darren Buck, director of power delivery, is overseeing emergency preparedness work that has incorporated
lessons from past incidents into the utility’s modernization and reliability planning.
“We have a very solid vegetation management plan that my team has implemented based off local climate conditions. We have trained incident commanders in our operational division who keep track of how to address not just fires, but floods and tornadoes as well,” Buck said.
Buck noted that much of Platte River’s scenario forecasting and mitigation work has involved gaming out how environmental stressors might play against the structure of its grid, such as how wildfires could affect solar generation.
“We have been running every possible scenario. For example, you can run a case with low solar output and high heat, including when a fire’s smoke is blocking out solar output amidst peak temperatures when demand is climbing and you have low wind production as well. We’ve mapped out all these sensitivities, and our power supply group runs hundreds of different models to consider how certain stressors might play out,” Buck said.
Borton noted that Platte River’s resilience work has benefited from learning how other public power utilities have effectively enhanced grid resilience, especially through knowledge sharing and mutual support.
“Public power utilities love talking with each other about what works and what doesn’t. I just had a great conversation with Matthew Emerson over at [Los Angeles Water and Power], who operates a [virtual power plant] there and has similar goals,” Borton said.
Ultimately, Platte River’s efforts tie back to its dedication to its member communities and close relationships with those it serves.
“That’s what public power is all about. It’s listening to people and understanding their needs and making sure those shape the ways our organization moves forward,” Borton said.
