Utilities used to plan around relatively predictable demand. That assumption is disappearing.

In this opening keynote from Intersolar & Energy Storage North America Midwest, Nico Johnson sits down with 3 utility executives; Bria Shea of Xcel Energy, Andy Plenge of ComEd, and Brice Sheriff of Ameren Illinois to examine what happens when electricity demand can arrive faster than the infrastructure needed to serve it—and distributed energy resources increasingly change how power moves across the grid.

The conversation explores the difficult balance between reliability, affordability, and investment; what rising electricity costs actually reflect; the practical constraints to deploying more DERs; and how utilities are rethinking planning for a system with far more uncertainty than the one they inherited.

Three utilities operating in different markets arrive at a similar reality: planning the next grid will require more flexibility, better coordination, and new ways of thinking about both customers and the resources connected to the system.

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