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Value-Stacking Through Risk-Based Investment Planning
Utilities are replacing aging infrastructure, absorbing load growth that has outrun nearly every forecast, and hardening systems against climate hazards that keep getting worse. Most capital planning frameworks were built to handle one of those at a time, not all three at once. And the work is happening under the tightest affordability scrutiny in years, with regulators pressing harder on every dollar as industry capital plans push past a trillion dollars over the next five years.
Value-stacking is how a growing number of utilities are getting more out of each dollar: choosing investments that serve reliability, resilience, and capacity needs in a single project instead of funding each one separately. Risk-based planning is what makes that possible. When you score every candidate investment by how much risk it actually buys down, the projects that solve more than one problem at once rise to the top on their own, and the ranking gives planners a defensible reason for why this project beat that one. It also keeps bills in check during a period of record capital deployment, which is the case every utility now has to make to its regulator.
The hard part is resilience. A reliability benefit is straightforward to count. A resilience benefit shows up as a cost that never lands on any ledger, because the outage or the ignition or the failure didn't happen. A regulator can't approve what a planner can't put a number on, and most scoring frameworks go quiet right where the climate risk lives. Getting value-stacking to hold up in a rate case means putting defensible numbers on exactly those avoided costs.
This panel gets into how utilities are doing that work today: how planning teams score multi-benefit projects, how they're making the resilience case to regulators, and where this approach has changed which project actually got funded. Attendees leave with concrete approaches to risk-based capital allocation, a clearer sense of how peers quantify benefits that resist quantification, and a frank read on where the methods still fall short.
