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The grid was never designed for the world it’s being asked to serve. Electrification is accelerating faster than planners expected; extreme heat is swelling peak demand; and climate-driven disasters are smashing records while breaking infrastructure.

Yet the electric industry is expected to build a grid that can deliver reliable power to regions that may succumb to, survive or even thrive in a future further affected by climate change.

Planning for the grid of the future requires increasingly sophisticated prognostication, and the industry needs to look to new data sources for modeling. Climate scientists and economists have become as important as engineers, and traditional peak-demand forecasts and resource-adequacy models cannot capture the compound stresses facing today’s grid.

Wayne Gretzky famously said he “skate[s] to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” That’s all very well if you know where it’s going to be — difficult for a puck, even more so for a grid being expanded in an environment some call a polycrisis.

Utilities and regional planners no longer can rely on models built for a more stable, predictable climate, one that no longer exists. To build a grid that is both reliable and resilient, planners now need modeling tools that integrate growth patterns and climate risk. The next generation of modeling — probabilistic, scenario-based, climate-informed — is not simply an upgrade. It’s becoming the minimum requirement for any utility, regulator or investor hoping to keep pace with the world in which the grid must operate.

A new measure launched in November by the First Street Foundation may prove a critical tool for understanding the intersection of climate risk and economic growth.

Resilience Spread, a concept coined by First Street, captures the intersection of two opposing forces, like Dr. Doolittle’s fictitious Pushmi-Pullyu, a double-headed llama that tries to move in two opposite directions at once. In one direction, there are positive market forces, reflected in population growth, economic strength and amenities such as housing and transportation. In the other direction, there are negative climate risks.

The Resilience Spread quantifies the gap between a region’s climate exposure and its ability to adapt. It’s a gap that is widening in many areas, creating a patchwork of vulnerability. Looking at 400+ of the world’s major cities, First Street determined that economic strength is outweighing climate risk by a massive $1.8 trillion globally, which “illustrates that, on average, strong macroeconomic conditions and consumer confidence continue to offset the drag of climate hazards,” the report said.

But the average is meaningless for planners. What’s important is how individual cities are expected to perform, and that ranges widely. And there’s also the factor of time. While today’s global spread is net positive, “this cushion is not permanent. Without significant adaptation, the spread is projected to erode steadily, tipping negative before the end of the century as climate pressures intensify faster than foundational macroeconomic conditions.”