2027 Event Agenda

Georgia Power recently initiated a new risk evaluation initiative with the potential to set a new standard for decision-making across the Southeast. Having led the effort, Josh Stallings, VP, Distribution Strategy and Support at Georgia Power Company, will walk through the framework, early lessons learned, and key considerations behind the approach. 

Traditionally, resiliency programs such as vegetation management and pole loading have operated as separate, parallel workflows. While each is designed to address specific risks, the result is often a piecemeal understanding of risk exposure that makes it difficult to prioritize hardening activities and to identify the most problematic root causes behind customer outages. 

Georgia Power took action to confront an all-too-common dynamic whereby addressing workflow-specific risks, such as trimming encroaching vegetation or replacing overutilized poles, does not equate to capturing the full resiliency opportunity. In response to this challenge, the team sought to more accurately identify exactly what combination of actions in what contexts predictably and demonstrably improves resiliency. The team developed a unified risk framework that considers asset condition and utilization, vegetation exposure, and weather simulation into a common decision-making model that weights risks against customer impact based on high-confidence data.

Rather than evaluating surface-level risks independently, the framework enables teams to assess the probability of failure and customer impact across multiple risk categories simultaneously, representing a shift to a forward-looking understanding of risk. 

The initiative has shown how individual poles and entire circuits can be re-ranked based on underlying customer impact risk rather than historical performance metrics and other heuristics, highlighting more defensible investment priorities than traditional approaches. By combining existing datasets and risk models into a single lens, Georgia Power standardized a risk evaluation framework that accounts for how risks that most utilities treat as discrete due to administrative parameters intersect in the real world. 

Ultimately, the analysis identified clear opportunities to improve resiliency alongside affordability by developing layered solutions for the highest-risk assets and conditions regardless of organizational ownership or workflow boundaries. 

Attendees will learn how Georgia Power:

• Evolved from piecemeal risk assessment to a unified risk framework
• Evaluated shared root causes across disparate risk areas using uniform customer impact criteria
• Established a common data foundation and decision “currency” to improve cross-functional alignment