Providing reliable, affordable, and low-carbon electricity to customers, while accelerating the adoption of low-carbon technologies, such as renewable energy, electric vehicles and electrified buildings, requires ongoing ingenuity and innovations. On top of these planning and procurement challenges, climate change has exposed system-wide vulnerabilities and elevated the urgency of adapting the electric sector to new risks. To do this, electric sector planners face the difficult task of understanding which climate science and technology adoption data are appropriate to use, and how best to apply that data to plan for an uncertain future.

The problem of identifying and applying appropriate climate data, which has been referred to as “The Practitioner’s Dilemma,” is not new, and it affects multiple U.S. economic sectors beyond electricity (e.g., agriculture, drinking water). For the electric sector, it is becoming more pressing as the sector experiences climate impacts with increasing frequency and severity. This presentation shares the outcomes of a workshop that brought together climate scientists and electric-sector practitioners to take stock of ongoing efforts to produce decision-relevant climate information, evaluate the fitness of climate information, and characterize uncertainty that facilitates implementation of adaptation and mitigation measures.