Uncertain energy availability remains an “extreme priority risk” for the Midwest Reliability Organization for the third year in a row as generation growth fails to keep pace with rapidly rising demand, representing the highest level of risk classification in the regional entity’s 2026 Regional Risk Assessment.

Six other risks were classified as high priority in the assessment, released Feb. 23. Extreme and high risks are considered to require “immediate attention for regional awareness and mitigation efforts,” as opposed to medium and low risks, which can be “managed with routine procedures or less intensive monitoring.”

The six high priority risks are nation-state threats; generation outages during extreme cold weather; supply chain compromises; inadequate inverter performance and modeling; malicious insider threats; and material and equipment unavailability. All were a high risk in 2025 except material and equipment unavailability, which moved up from medium to high in the 2026 report. Another seven risks, including loss of essential reliability services, physical attacks, inaccurate facility ratings and various cybersecurity risks, were considered medium priority.

MRO produces the Regional Risk Assessment each year as a supplement to NERC’s Long-Term Reliability Assessment. Risks are identified throughout the previous year from various sources including risk assessments, government intelligence and stakeholder engagement, and ranked by a team comprising subject matter expert volunteers and MRO staff according to potential impact and likelihood of occurrence.

In NERC’s 2025 LTRA, released Jan. 29, the ERO warned that multiple assessment areas — including significant parts of MRO’s footprint — face a high risk of energy shortfalls over the next 10 years, largely because of projected demand growth outstripping planned generation additions. (See NERC Warns of ‘Worsening’ Resource Adequacy Through 2035.)

The regional assessment is consistent with this analysis, citing “accelerating retirements of dispatchable power plants before adequate replacement energy is available, limited transmission capacity and barriers to timely deployment of new infrastructure” in the MRO region to explain why uncertain energy availability earned the highest risk rating. Amplifying the risk is the increasing presence of weather-dependent, hard-to-forecast resources like wind and solar among projected new generation.

The report’s authors moved material and equipment unavailability up in the rankings because of “industry sentiment on lead time extensions and the loss of guaranteed production slots for major grid equipment [like] transformers and circuit breakers.” MRO pointed to reports of utilities “cannibalizing underutilized equipment” to prevent delays to urgent repairs and new construction in more heavily used parts of the grid.

Generation outages during extreme cold weather remain a high priority risk, MRO said, with winter demand growth continuing to outpace summer demand growth and “signaling a fundamental shift toward winter-peaking energy usage.”

However, the RE also assessed the risk as slightly less likely to occur, primarily because of the adoption of NERC’s new cold-weather reliability standards such as EOP-012-3 (Extreme cold weather preparedness and operations), which took effect Oct. 1, 2025. (See FERC Clarifies Cold Weather Standard Approval, Effective Date.)

“There are performance improvements as evidenced by no major events within the MRO region; discovering limits and managing those equipment limits have yielded tangible results,” MRO wrote. “There is a sense of ‘cautious optimism’ with this progress, as reliability concerns remain in the production and delivery of natural gas and whether recent extreme winter storms match conditions seen in benchmark storms.”