For decades, selling resilience was one of the onsite power industry’s toughest jobs.
Unlike energy efficiency, resilience produced no monthly savings to point to. Unlike solar, it didn’t visibly reduce electricity bills. Its value existed largely in a hypothetical future—the outage that might happen next month, next year, or perhaps never.
That made resilience feel like insurance: expensive, prudent, and difficult to justify until disaster struck.
Now resilience is no longer just a way to survive an outage; it’s become a means to enhance revenue sooner, lower operating costs, satisfy investors and protect long-term enterprise value.
These new values are emerging amid long utility interconnection delays, rising electricity costs, and power demand that threatens to exceed grid capacity.
That’s one of the themes that emerged during a panel discussion at Xendee University Week that I moderated June 9, featuring Jake Rudesill of Hyliion, Davis Plunkett of Siemens and Kevin O’Connell of MacAllister CAT. Although each approached the market from a different perspective, all described changing customer priorities.
Five Californias of new demand
The urgency begins with the grid itself.
Rudesill pointed to forecasts from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation indicating that electricity demand will grow by roughly 230-250 GW over the next decade.
To put that into perspective, he noted, California’s peak electric load is roughly 50 GW.
“What we’re saying in this forecast is that we’re going to add roughly five Californias to the North American electrical grid over the next 10 years,” Rudesill said.
That unprecedented demand is colliding with an electric system already under strain from aging infrastructure, retiring generation and mounting maintenance costs.
The consequences are showing up in manufacturers delaying expansions because power isn’t available, and data centers looking for alternatives to grid service.
“We’re just at the beginning of this journey,” Rudesill said. “It’s only going to get worse.”
Value-stacking
The traditional backup generator is most valuable when the power fails. Today’s distributed energy systems are expected to earn their keep every day.
Customers increasingly expect onsite generation to reduce demand charges, participate in demand response programs, support future microgrids, provide backup power and act as a bridge until grid interconnections become available.
O’Connell described today’s projects as “kind of a two-part solution.”
“The first is resiliency and then monetization by potentially using that asset for peaking or demand response programs,” he said.
Plunkett said Siemens increasingly helps customers “stack value” by combining resilience with demand response revenues, optimized utility tariffs and sustainability goals.
“The best thing to do,” he said, “is to try and articulate how they’re not in competition—how we can meet a resiliency goal while also producing value.”
The biggest risk: delay
Perhaps nowhere is that shift more obvious than in today’s race to secure electricity.
For many customers, the biggest financial risk isn’t an outage.
It’s the long wait for utility service.
Asked whether speed-to-power has become more valuable than resilience itself, Plunkett said: “In a word, yes, absolutely,” he said. “The speed requirement or desire from these customers is tremendous. It’s kind of unlike anything I think the electrical industry has seen before.”
Yet Rudesill argued that speed and resilience are increasingly inseparable.
“The same microgrid that gets you to revenue faster is also the one that’s going to deliver your resilience in most cases,” he said. “Speed gets you to revenue, gets you to market, and resilience keeps you there.”
Quantifying climate risk
Another powerful argument for resilience is emerging, one that extends well beyond outages or delayed utility connections.
A recent report from the Schneider Electric Research Institute concludes that climate risk is fundamentally changing the economics of data center investment.
The institute estimates that climate exposure—including extreme weather, wildfire, cooling stress, business interruption and supply-chain disruptions—places roughly $388 billion of the world’s approximately $1 trillion data center asset base at risk.
Rather than treating resilience investments as insurance, the report argues they should be viewed as financial assets that preserve enterprise value.
That broader perspective reinforces what the panelists described from their own customer conversations. Whether the driver is speed-to-power, electricity costs or climate exposure, resilience is increasingly being evaluated as a business investment rather than an insurance expense.
What customers now know
While AI data centers dominate headlines, traditional commercial and industrial customers are encountering many of the same constraints.
Manufacturers that utilities once aggressively pursued are now finding themselves waiting behind hyperscale facilities for new electric capacity.
“We’re already seeing it in parts of the Midwest,” O’Connell said. “Customers being told it’s no longer months, it’s years for additional power.”
As a result, customers are becoming far more sophisticated energy buyers.
“They’re having to become a lot more sophisticated in their understanding of energy, how it’s used and what it costs,” O’Connell said.
The disappearing “cogen killers”
Perhaps the clearest sign of the market’s transformation is the changing relationship between utilities and customer-owned generation, like cogeneration.
O’Connell recalled a time when one utility maintained an internal group known as the “cogen killers,” whose job was to discourage onsite generation projects.
Today, he said, those same utilities are referring customers for onsite generation because they cannot meet demand quickly enough.
“They’re referring customers, also bringing them to us as partners,” O’Connell said.
Rudesill described utilities pursuing distributed generation themselves to provide temporary bridge power while waiting for permanent infrastructure.
“The utility model is definitely changing here,” he said.
A different conversation
One exchange during the discussion may best illustrate how far the industry has come.
Asked about the biggest misconception surrounding resilience, Plunkett observed that many customers still assume resilience should pay for itself entirely through avoided outages.
Rudesill responded with a different way of thinking.
“Resilience is no longer a cost,” he said. “The asset that is providing value day in, day out at your facility is also mitigating your downside. You’re not paying for resilience. Resilience is rather a dividend of selecting the right asset.”
The technology hasn’t changed nearly as much as the conversation around it. Resilience has moved beyond insurance to become a bigger economic asset.
