A five-alarm fire for the grid? (Live)

It’s been nearly a year since a national energy emergency was declared, with big promises on prices and reliability. So we’re asking a simple question: how’s that going?

In this live episode of Open Circuit, recorded at the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, we take stock of a power system under growing strain. Outages are up, prices are up, markets are stressed, and grid reliability experts are warning of a “five-alarm fire.”

We’ll start with a look at how accelerating load growth, tighter reserve margins, delayed interconnection, and extreme weather are colliding — and what breaks first if current planning assumptions don’t change.

Then, we’re joined on stage by Wilson Rickerson, president and co-founder of Converge Strategies, to explore grid resilience through a national security lens. As the military increasingly depends on the civilian grid, what happens when that system is under sustained stress?

Wilson explains why thinking about the grid in a wartime context leads to familiar priorities: flexibility, transmission expansion, regional markets, and better coordination. And we talk about a report from Converge on lessons from the grid at war.

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