Dr. Matthew Green is SVP at TRC, a member of WSP. He has more than two decades of experience driving transformative energy initiatives.
A utility CEO recently gave me the sharpest framing of the affordability moment I have heard. In essence, he said that electricity costs rose more slowly than inflation for an entire generation, so the utilities industry lived comfortably below the radar.
Then affordability became a national crisis, arriving just as our industry began outpacing inflation. The result is a spotlight on investment prudence unlike anything utilities have ever experienced.
The numbers confirm it. Residential electricity rates rose more than 10% in the past year, according to Consumer Reports research. Meanwhile, utilities requested a record $31 billion in rate increases in 2025, per a Powerlines assessment, which is a little more than double the prior year.
Regulators, governors and customers now ask the same question of every capital dollar: Is this the right investment? This scrutiny is not a passing storm, but a Pandora’s box that will not close.
Utilities need to ensure they are not only making the right investments but can also prove it. In previous articles, I’ve made the case that Band-Aid fixes have run their course and that utilities must shift from deterministic to probabilistic planning.
The next step is about action, and it involves a planning principle critical to driving affordability. I call it one-to-many: one asset, many value streams; one plan, many futures.
The Root Problem: Solutions Before Needs
With capital strained, every utility now runs an internal contest over which projects proceed. The process looks quantitative. Safety, reliability, customer satisfaction and other factors are converted into scores. Projects are then ranked, and capital follows.
By the time something is called a project, it is already a solution. An aging asset becomes a “replacement project.” A capacity constraint becomes a “substation project.”
Consider how an overloaded feeder becomes a “reconductoring project.” That overloaded feeder might instead be relieved by shifting load to an adjacent circuit, a flexible interconnection agreement or a targeted battery, each with different costs, risks and side benefits.
That is where one-to-many planning starts. Keep the need open. Test wires, non-wires and operational alternatives against it. Test them across plausible futures rather than one forecast, and count every value stream each option creates. Only then does a solution become a project.
Other industries have operated this way for years. Pharmaceutical companies manage R&D as probability-weighted portfolios, where projects survive or die against transparent logic everyone can interrogate. Defense planners use capabilities-based planning rather than designing forces around one predicted threat.
The math is intuitive. An asset that delivers value across five plausible futures is a safer investment than one that works only if a single forecast proves correct. A solution that addresses both capacity and reliability has more ways to earn its place than one justified by a single benefit. Investments that keep showing up as good answers as assumptions change become the no-regrets core of the plan.
Proof From The Field
Even applied late, one-to-many planning can rescue an investment.
One large, regulated North American electric utility serving a major metropolitan area that I worked with had an aging distribution automation system with field switches that isolate faults and restore power automatically.
Many devices were out of vendor support, maintenance had fallen behind and the scheme failed whenever the grid was out of its normal configuration. Judged on reliability alone, fixing it looked marginal. With affordability pressure mounting and failing equipment competing for capital, the program was nearly cut.
Viewed one-to-many, the case changed. Proactive replacement drove long-term maintenance costs down. Centralized control, built on a live grid model, kept automation working in abnormal configurations, where much of the reliability value was concentrated. Targeted new switches deferred feeder upgrades and cut patrol miles.
For less than 20% more than keeping the old system limping along, the program avoided outage minutes at a fifth of the cost of proactive cable replacement and eliminated over 1,700 manual switching operations a year. It became a better use of reliability dollars and a foundation for the future grid.
The most important finding: Those benefits materialize only if the utility changes how it works, retiring paper-based switching, redefining roles across the control room, field crews and engineering, and naming a single accountable owner. The broader value case held up, and the program was approved.
And that was a rescue performed downstream, after the solution was chosen. Applied with the need established upstream, the same discipline shapes what gets proposed in the first place.
Why The Biggest Hurdle Is Operational
As a consultant supporting many utility projects, I’ve found that operational change is also why so many promising alternatives stall.
Across the industry, non-wires alternatives are stuck in pilot purgatory or quietly deprioritized because their value cases do not pencil under current planning and operating conditions. In fact, many were never economic as single-purpose pilots to begin with. Meanwhile, real assets are failing and capacity needs are legitimate; in that dogfight, capital flows to what decision-makers trust.
A shinier storage project cannot solve those challenges. Only an investment decision-making system people can interrogate, understand and trust can move these projects forward. And that system should be open to regulators and stakeholders.
Let them see the assumptions. Better yet, let them change the assumptions themselves. Test different futures, costs, operating conditions and value streams and see whether the investment still holds up. Lifecycle cost and 8760 analysis, which tests performance across every hour of the year, become part of that model, rather than analyses performed after the solution has already been chosen.
Prudence then moves from something defended in arrears to something applied at origination.
The Clock Is Running
Under the affordability spotlight, every project must pass the affordability test. Utilities should start one step earlier: Choose a system need, hold it open across futures and let the best answer earn its way to project status.
Then, when the question every utility now faces arrives, “Was this the right investment?”, the answer will have been built in from the start.
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