A “new era of thinking” is needed to respond to the rising level of reliability risk facing grid operators, former FERC Chair Neil Chatterjee said in a webinar hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy about the summer reliability landscape.

Chatterjee — now chief government affairs officer at climate technology developer Palmetto — was joined on the May 15 panel by Karen Onaran, CEO of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council; Devin Hartman, a senior fellow at R Street; and NERC Senior Engineer Stephen Coterillo, who shared details on the ERO’s recently released 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment. (See NERC Warns Summer Shortfalls Possible in Multiple Regions.)

The SRA, published the day before the webinar, showed multiple regions at “elevated” risk of energy shortfalls, meaning operating reserves should be adequate for normal operations but could be insufficient in above-normal conditions. Areas of elevated risk followed a line down the center of the continent touching MRO-SaskPower, MISO, MRO-SPP and ERCOT, along with NPCC-New England and WECC-Mexico in Baja California.

Reacting to the assessment’s warnings about the difficulty of meeting rising demand with resources like wind and solar power that provide “less flexibility and more variability,” Chatterjee acknowledged the electric reliability environment has changed significantly since his time on the commission, a phenomenon with which grid stakeholders still are coming to terms.

“I was quite fortunate during my tenure [at FERC] that we had relatively flat demand,” Chatterjee said. “I think what these reports are showing [is] that we are entering a new period here. … We’ve got to figure out how we meet this coming surge in demand while maintaining reliability and affordability.”

One of the “unfortunate” consequences of the era of relatively flat demand, Chatterjee continued, was “that solutions on the energy side started to become politicized,” with the political left associated with renewable energy and the right connected to traditional fossil fuel generation. He said the changing reliability landscape could “upend” this viewpoint, forcing both left and right to drop ingrained attitudes and welcome “every available electron” to meet the rising energy needs of artificial intelligence, vehicle electrification and other advancing technologies.

Onaran agreed with Chatterjee on “the need to depoliticize energy.” She referred to the SRA as the latest in a long line of reliability assessments that showed “we’re on the razor’s edge” with regard to managing increasingly impactful extreme weather events.

While there are long-term solutions that Onaran said regulators should pursue to address these issues, such as streamlining the approval process for transmission projects and interconnection requests, she also urged utilities to look at more immediate steps.

“If everything goes great and we all have sunny, 70-degree days all summer, we’re golden. But we know that that’s not going to happen, and that doesn’t happen in all regions,” Onaran said. “So, what can we do in the short term to make sure that we’re meeting … these edge experiences where we’re seeing either higher demand, or the weather’s not cooperating?”

Drawing on her experience working with large industrial consumers, Onaran suggested one positive short-term change would be to improve load forecasts so customers can know more confidently how much demand to expect. This would prevent underbuilding, leading to energy shortfalls or requiring imports, and overbuilding, which could cause unnecessary expenses to ratepayers.

Responding to Onaran, Hartman acknowledged the urgency of the near future but emphasized that utilities and regulators must not take their minds off the long term.

“We in the industry always have these … seasonal discussions about [how] things are looking in the months ahead,” Hartman said. “The truth is, the way that this industry moves at the policy level and the way investment decisions or changes in the system are made, it typically takes years to get changes made, and then years before the affected industry can respond to [them]. So, it’s always important to be looking for the long-term reliability trends and getting the apparatus correctly calibrated to expected conditions down the road.”