Our 2025 Year in Review highlights the many ways APPA helped public power leaders across the United States to adapt and thrive in a dynamic environment. We made significant progress in strengthening member value, expanding our reach, and modernizing operations while remaining flexible and responsive to rapidly evolving technologies, policy developments, and industry challenges.

In 2025, this included:

$5 million in new funding for grid security

Supporting Innovation and Grid Security

  • Secured $5 million in new funding for public power utilities through cooperative agreements with the Department of Energy
  • Issued $1.2 million in new grant funding through DEED, public power’s R&D program

 

Preparing the Workforce for What's Next

100+ APPA Academy events

  • More than 8,000 people from 1,100 organizations took part in APPA Academy events in 2025
  • Provided 25 virtual trainings and events
  • Held two Safe Haven exercises, which gathered 80+ utility
    professionals to examine how public power would respond to an attack affecting both cyber and physical assets
  • Connected more than 7,000 professionals on APPA Engage, an online community platform
     

“These programs allow big ideas to turn into big deliverables and allow us to get things done. We avoided spending many hours recreating the wheel and replicating someone else’s work who likely put much more time and resources into solving the challenge.”
 

JEFF GORRIE, Director of Energy Services, Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities

Participants in the Safe Haven exercise

Protected Your Interests

From environmental regulations to tariffs, tax policy, data centers, permitting reform, and disaster response, 2025 involved a lot of legislative and regulatory activity for the electric sector. Our team worked tirelessly to understand how these policies and federal actions affected your operations and bottom line – and relayed those effects to the policymakers in Washington.

Specifically, we: 

  • Preserved tax-exempt financing and elective payment to enable public power utilities to more affordably build much needed energy infrastructure and access to key energy tax credits.
  • Waived sequestration of Build America Bond, New Clean Renewable Energy Bond, and elective pay energy tax credit payments, preserving an estimated $273 million in annual payments.
  • Worked to make it easier and faster to get energy projects built while preserving environmental protections such as through the SPEED Act, PERMIT Act, and ePermit Act.
  • Supported a continued federal role in disaster response and recovery and quicker reimbursement for public power utilities through the FEMA Reform Act.
  • Pushed to improve vegetation management and reduce wildfire risk around power lines with the Fix Our Forests Act.
Collage of covers from 2025 APPA publications and programs, including Statistical Report, Salary survey Report, magazine, and Ratio report

Recognized Operational Excellence

  • Designated 18 utilities with Diamond-level Reliable Public Power Provider honors, 14 utilities as Smart Energy Providers, and two with gold-level Customer Satisfaction Awards
  • Honored 12 utilities with awards of excellence$1.2 million issued in DEED grants

Shared Your Story

  • Featured 130+ members through exclusive interviews in Public Power magazine, Public Power Current, and on the Public Power Now podcast

Created Tailored Tools

  • Released an updated reliability tracking service, Power TRX Reliability
  • Curated rate design case studies and developed a series of briefs on energy technologies
  • Developed timely reports, including What Public Power Needs to Know About Data Centers

Read more in our 2025 Year in Review.