2025 was a turbulent year for the energy sector. Demand from electrification and data centers surged at the same time that policy conditions shifted and systems with growing shares of variable resources faced new reliability questions. These pressures converged across every part of the electric grid: utilities and market operators revisited resource adequacy practices, states updated long-term climate plans, developers searched for viable sites in constrained regions, and planners re-evaluated the tools and assumptions that underlie investment decisions. Throughout the year, E3 worked with our clients across North America to navigate this rapid change by providing analysis, planning support, and new modeling tools to help navigate a reliable, affordable, and low-carbon transition.
Data Centers and Large Loads
In 2025, data centers moved from emerging topic to core planning challenge for many of E3’s clients. Across states, utilities, and large technology companies, E3’s work focused on three questions: how fast this load could grow, how to serve it reliably while meeting clean energy goals, and how to design tariffs and credit policies that protect other customers. Alongside high‑profile public studies, we supported utilities and developers with foundational work on market intelligence, forecasting, and rate design in the country’s fastest‑growing data center hubs.
- Virginia Data Center Study: Electric Infrastructure and Customer Rate Impacts (JLARC). E3 modeled how different data center growth scenarios could affect Virginia’s entire electric system, from infrastructure needs and resource portfolios to customer rates and retail rate equity.
- Tailored for Scale: Designing Electric Rates and Tariffs for Large Loads.For Amazon, E3 zoomed in to the facility level, comparing what specific data centers pay in utility bills compared to the marginal cost to serve data center customers.
- Balancing Risk and Growth: Best Practices for Utility Credit and Collateral Requirements for Large Load Customers. Written for the Data Center Coalition, E3’s whitepaper proposes a modern, risk‑aligned framework for utility credit and collateral. It recommends menu‑driven credit tools that protect ratepayers from stranded asset risk without deterring high‑value load growth.
- Forecasting Large Loads in the Age of AI and Data Centers. E3’s whitepaper provides tools to rethink large load forecasting as AI data centers introduce rapid, clustered, and often speculative load growth. Standard forecasting methods are built for gradual change; instead, planners need a framework that accounts for uncertainty.
- Confidential utility clients: strategy, forecasting, and rate design support. E3 advised multiple utilities in top U.S. data center markets on topics ranging from market intelligence and load forecasting to tariff design and portfolio strategy, including illustrative “solution matrices” for how different combinations of contracts, rate structures, and self‑supply options can balance utility risk with developers’ need for speed and flexibility.
- San Francisco Climate Week 2025: AI x Energy, Gridlocked or Grid Unlocked?
At our SF Climate Week panel, utility, developer, and ratepayer‑advocate speakers discussed the collision of rapid AI‑driven load growth with long infrastructure timelines. The recording is available to watch here.
Resource Adequacy
Resource adequacy (RA) took center stage this year. E3 led major regional RA studies for coalitions of utilities in the Pacific Northwest and Desert Southwest, while supporting New Brunswick Power, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, Florida Power & Light, Xcel Energy, and others in updating planning reserve margins, calculating effective load carrying capability (ELCC) values, and developing and implementing reliability frameworks for systems ranging from small islanded grids to the largest electricity markets in North America.
- Resource Adequacy for the Energy Transition: A Critical Periods Reliability Framework and its Applications in Planning and Markets. E3 developed a modern reliability framework that shifts the focus from peak demand to “critical periods” – the system’s most constrained hours. As power systems accommodate higher penetration of variable resources, these critical periods are increasingly diverging from traditional peaks.
- Meeting New Brunswick’s Growing Capacity Needs with a Future-Ready Resource Adequacy Planning Framework. E3’s study proposes a future‑ready RA process that links probabilistic reliability studies to a recurring three‑year planning cadence and clear regulatory decision points for new capacity.
- Demand Response as a Capacity Resource in SPP’s Era of Data Center Growth. This E3 whitepaper quantifies the ELCC of different demand response designs in SPP, showing that well‑designed, longer‑duration DR can earn capacity credit comparable to storage and thermal resources while helping integrate new large loads.
- Q&A: “Planning for reliability when the sun doesn’t shine” with Nick Schlag. A Q&A with E3’s resource adequacy expert that discusses what’s changing and what matters in the world of RA.
- Illinois 2025 Resource Adequacy Study. E3 supported Illinois agencies in assessing current and projected resource adequacy conditions in PJM, MISO, and Illinois zones, documenting emerging risks and evaluating resource pathways that can meet reliability needs alongside state policy targets.
Demand-Side Grid Flexibility
Utilities are increasingly looking to demand-side flexibility and grid-edge technologies to manage rapid load growth from electrification without overbuilding. In 2025, E3 helped clients design programs, technologies, and optimization strategies that turn distributed energy resources (DERs) and new electrified loads into grid services. These projects show how flexible demand can defer infrastructure upgrades, advance environmental justice goals, and keep long-run costs lower for ratepayers.
- DER-iving Local Value: Distribution Grid Services in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. For the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and state partners, E3 developed a valuation framework and roadmap for compensating DERs that provide location-specific distribution grid services.
- Unlocking the Value of Smart Panels: The Benefits of a Utility Ownership Model for Smart Electric Panels. E3’s case study for SPAN quantifies how utility-owned smart panels on a constrained California feeder can avoid or defer customer panel upgrades and distribution investments while enabling electrification.
- Unlocking the Value of Flexible DERs: The Benefits of Optimizing EV Charging for Systemwide and Distribution Grid-Edge Constraints. For Rhythmos.io, E3 shows that moving to managed EV charging can reduce system costs by up to ~60% per EV and avoid transformer overloads.
Transmission Planning
E3 is using capacity expansion modeling and policy analysis to identify multi‑decade, multi‑state transmission pathways that balance reliability, affordability, and decarbonization. At the same time, we’re helping states, regional transmission organizations, and investors get more from existing infrastructure through grid‑enhancing technologies and probabilistic planning tools that better reflect uncertainty in future load, resources, and extreme weather.
- Cost and benefits assessment of grid‑enhancing technologies in Maine. For the Maine Public Utilities Commission, E3 evaluated technologies such as dynamic line ratings, power flow controls, topology optimization, and virtual power plants, finding that targeted deployments can defer traditional upgrades.
- Probabilistic planning methods for MISO. In a white paper for MISO, E3 reviewed emerging probabilistic methods across power flow, production cost, and capacity expansion models and recommended a hybrid framework so transmission planners can design “least‑regrets” investments that perform well across uncertain futures.
- Opportunities for Offshore Wind in Atlantic Canada. E3’s modeling for Net Zero Atlantic assessed how offshore wind could meet winter peaks, enable exports to New England, and support future hydrogen production, while highlighting that realizing these opportunities will depend on significant transmission expansion and coordinated grid integration planning.
Distribution Planning and Grid Modernization
This year we expanded our in‑house distribution engineering and planning expertise. Together with new talent and new capabilities across the Willdan family (E3’s parent company), we’re helping clients plan for distribution upgrades, demand flexibility, and equity-focused electrification in the same frame.
- Welcoming Bob and Jeremy. E3’s first distribution engineer, Bob Zavadil brings 45+ years of experience in transmission and distribution planning, renewable interconnection, and grid modernization, adding a deeply technical perspective to our distribution work. Jeremy Laundergan adds two decades of experience helping utilities plan and implement grid modernization, flexible load integration, and advanced distribution system management.
- Expanding capabilities through APG. Willdan’s acquisition of Alternative Power Generation (APG) broadens the electrical engineering bench we can tap for data center substations, commercial microgrids, EV charging, and renewable interconnection projects.
- PG&E Electrification Impact Study. E3’s major analysis for PG&E evaluated how rapid building and transportation electrification will affect distribution infrastructure and showed how smart planning and load flexibility can accommodate growth while managing long-term costs.
Integrated System and Resource Planning
E3 is helping planners modernize integrated resource plans and move toward integrated system planning. Our work pairs production cost and capacity expansion modeling with new frameworks for co‑optimizing generation, transmission, distribution, and customer resources. Through collaborations with partners and long‑term IRP clients, we’re shaping the methods that utilities and regulators will use to plan reliable, affordable clean power systems over the next several decades.
- Integrating Wind Energy in Alaska’s Railbelt. For Alaska’s islanded Railbelt system, E3 showed how 300 MW of wind could reliably serve over a quarter of annual electricity while cutting fuel costs and emissions.
- ESIG Integrated Planning Task Force reports. E3 co‑authored the Foundations of Integrated Planning and Optimization for Integrated Electricity System Planning reports, laying out a practical framework and “walk/jog/run” roadmap for integrating generation, transmission, distribution, and DER.
- E3 Selected to Lead the Next Phase of CPUC IRP Support. Building on a decade of work with the CPUC, E3 was re‑selected to support California’s IRP process, using RESOLVE and related tools to design system plans that have already underpinned nearly 19 GW of reliability procurement and point to ~100 GW of new clean capacity by 2040.
- El Paso Electric 2025 Integrated System Plan. E3 supported EPE’s first ISP with scenario design, modeling, reliability analysis, and facilitation of a comprehensive stakeholder process.
State Climate Pathways and Comprehensive Planning
We supported governors, agencies, and alliances in comparing multiple decarbonization pathways, testing how electrification, clean electricity, and new loads like data centers interact with affordability and reliability. Across this work, we used common modeling tools and frameworks so lessons from one state could inform others while still reflecting local policy and economic conditions.
- New York Approves 2025 Draft Energy Plan. E3’s analysis helped New York test multiple economy‑wide decarbonization pathways, linking Climate Act goals to specific resource portfolios, transmission needs, and customer impacts.
- E3 Supports U.S. Climate Alliance in 2025 Annual Report. For the Alliance of governors, we quantified emissions trajectories and clean energy progress across member states, highlighting practical pathways to net zero that balance ambition with system reliability.
- New Jersey’s Latest Energy Master Plan. E3 provided the technical modeling for New Jersey’s 2024 Energy Master Plan, comparing electrification and clean power pathways and examining how emerging winter peaks, data center growth, and regional coordination shape long-term system needs.
Tools Updates
As policy, costs, taxes and tariffs, and siting conditions shifted this year, we put a lot of effort into keeping E3’s core planning tools current and building a new generation of models. We released multiple RECOST updates and refreshed New York’s Value Stack Calculator so resource cost and DER revenue assumptions keep pace with changing markets. At the same time, we continued long-running work to maintain the California Public Utilities Commission’s Avoided Cost Calculator and launched new tools like RELOCATE and REMATCH to support siting and procurement decisions for large loads and developers.
- Resource Costs (RECOST): We continually refresh our levelized cost forecasts to account for changing conditions. Our Q3 update, for example, brings in OBBBA and detailed import tariff scenarios, showing that under high-tariff assumptions new gas can temporarily beat wind and solar on cost, while battery storage economics remain especially sensitive to trade policy.
- NYSERDA Value Stack Calculator 2025 Update: We completed another annual refresh of New York’s public Value Stack Calculator, updating historical and forecasted Value Stack components and refining rate and payment logic to better capture compensation for storage and hybrid DER projects.
- CPUC Avoided Cost Calculator: E3 continued our two‑decade role maintaining the CPUC’s avoided cost methodology and DER Avoided Cost Calculator, which now underpins cost‑effectiveness testing for California’s full DER portfolio and is updated to reflect evolving market, reliability, and air-quality priorities.
- RELOCATE: We introduced RELOCATE, a geospatial site‑screening tool that combines nodal price history, land and labor costs, environmental and disaster risk, and proximity to key infrastructure to help large-load customers and developers compare data center and generation sites across U.S. markets.
- REMATCH: Our new REMATCH load‑matching model helps data centers, hydrogen producers, and other large energy users design least‑cost, low‑carbon procurement portfolios by optimizing mixes of renewables, storage, and contracts to meet specific uptime and emissions goals across regions.
Market Price Forecasts
E3 also released a major update to our North American power market forecasts, reflecting the first full view of post-Budget Reconciliation Bill policy conditions, accelerated load growth from data centers and new industrial activity, and higher resource costs driven by tariffs and supply-chain constraints. The 2025 Core Case provides fundamentals-based energy, capacity, ancillary service, and REC price trajectories through 2055 for every major market. With another update planned for Q1 2026, we are continuing to track how policy changes and technology costs shape long-run market dynamics.
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