Q: U.S. investor-owned utilities are planning about a trillion dollars in grid investments by 2030. But how much will go toward resilience?

"In 2024, investor-owned utilities spent about $30 billion on what they categorize as adaptation, hardening and resilience," Hamm explains. "Even if we assumed a significant increase in that $30 billion, that still means maybe only a quarter of that trillion will be spent on resilience."

The tension isn’t just about underinvestment — it’s also about misallocation. Hamilton points to Entergy's $2 billion effort to harden poles and lines to meet new 150 mph wind standards for hurricanes. The catch: Some of the equipment being ripped out hasn't fully depreciated, meaning customers effectively paid twice.

"Maybe there's other things we can do that would not cause us to just double the cost of everything, but that would be much more strategic and targeted," Hamilton argues.

Q: What's driving the investment wave?

Extreme weather, rising load, and aging assets are all colliding at once. Utilities say they have no choice but to harden the system and modernize the grid. But the traditional playbook, like undergrounding lines at enormous cost, may not deliver the best value.

"Instead of putting a billion dollars into undergrounding 600 miles of cable for rural communities," Hamilton argues, "maybe use that same billion dollars to put a microgrid at every single fire station in California."

Hamm says that shift is already underway. "There have been cases with the California utilities where they have decided, when there has been a wildfire, rather than rebuilding the poles and wires, that they have instead put in microgrids."

This is where the conversation is headed: surgical, risk-based investments rather than blanket infrastructure replacements. Hamm points to companies like Technosylva and Rhizome that are giving utilities far more sophisticated views into where wildfire, flood, or storm risk is highest, which is the kind of modeling regulators increasingly expect.

Q: Why are regulators and utilities so far apart on cost?

Reliability and resilience may sound similar, but they show up on customer bills in fundamentally different ways.

"Reliability is really measured in how many times a year does power go out [and] for how long? Whereas resilience is, how quickly can you recover from that?" Hamilton explains.

Hamm underscores the history behind the tension: “Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen an underinvestment in the transmission and distribution system, which is aging. We also need to play catch up, which just compounds the problem when we talk about affordability.”

Reliability spending is baked into customer rates, while resilience often requires new mechanisms and regulatory approval — especially when utilities start factoring in the broader cost of outages.

"It's not just the cost of the equipment, but what is the opportunity cost that's lost by everybody needing power at any given time — people having to go get hotel rooms, or people having to lose going to work,” Hamilton adds.

Q: Why are critical resilience technologies stuck in utility pilot purgatory while disasters accelerate?

Despite urgent resilience needs, the same AI and sensor technologies that oil and gas companies are deploying at scale remain trapped in utility pilot programs.

Shah asks utilities “what the five-year plan” is for moving from pilots to full rollout.

"I'm on year 18 of a pilot now," Shah vents, underscoring how long companies can languish in pilot mode. "Everyone is fleeing from the utility space because they're making way more money in the oil and gas space applying AI."

He points to billionaire Tom Siebel, whose company C3 developed software to help utilities prioritize maintenance. "After seven years of hiring the smartest people in the country and trying to get rate basing for this software, he abandoned the utility sector and went to oil and gas because, as he put it, he could make money there next week."

Hamm jumps in: “Jigar, what percentage of podcasts do you use that example?”

Shah doesn’t miss a beat. "He's a billionaire, so I would have thought that he was part of the same country club as those utilities, and he still didn't make any progress."

But Hamm says the pilot freeze isn’t universal and existential risk is shifting behavior. She points to Pano, an AI-enabled wildfire detection startup that quickly secured multimillion-dollar utility contracts.

“When there is an actual threat to the utility and its customers and its ability to do its job, they can move fast, and they will move fast,” she says.

Q: Who pays for the next decade of grid hardening?

This is the political and economic fault line: electricity rates are rising faster than inflation before the next wave of grid spending even hits.

"We have one in five households now that are behind on at least one energy bill," Shah emphasizes.

Shah also argues the crisis isn’t just financial. “The breakdown of trust is real,” he says. “The utilities have cried wolf a few times in the past and made a lot of money for shareholders.”

Hamm argues for a shift in framing. "We should stop talking about affordability in generalities, and start talking about what customers actually have a high energy burden, and what we can do to help those customers specifically."

That includes identifying customers who rely on refrigerated medicine or medical devices. "I think we will see a point in time when utilities begin to offer those customers backup in the form of solar, storage, or some other option," she predicts.

Everyone agrees the grid must become more resilient. No one agrees on how to pay for it.

If you want the full conversation, listen on Latitude Media, or wherever you get your podcasts.