Grid under pressure
Indicators of resilience, risk, and market rebalancing for power system planning
Power systems across North America are no longer being tested at the margins—they are being stress-tested at the system level. Load growth (including large-load concentration), tightening reserve margins, interconnection and transmission bottlenecks, and higher capital costs are converging in ways that make reliability and affordability inseparable.
What looked like isolated issues a few years ago—capacity market volatility, North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) compliance trends, distributed energy resource (DER) participation rules, natural gas contracting constraints—are now interacting. The result is a grid that is rebalancing under pressure, where resilience is being reinforced in some places, while risks are accumulating in others and market/ratemaking frameworks are struggling to keep pace.
