With the Midwest U.S. grappling with growing energy demand, extreme weather, regulatory pressure, and other risks, it’s worth taking a bird’s-eye-view at all the factors threatening reliability in the area.
Enter the Midwest Reliability Organization (MRO), which released its 2025 Regional Risk Assessment (RRA), highlighting growing challenges to maintaining a reliable electric grid.
Rapid increases in electricity demand, the retirement of traditional power plants before adequate replacement resources are available, extreme weather events, and escalating cyber and physical security threats all contribute to these challenges, per the assessment.
MRO is a non-profit organization dedicated to the reliability and security of the bulk power system in the central region of North America, including parts of both the United States and Canada. The RRA is published each year as part of ongoing efforts to inform industry leaders and other key decision-makers of the greatest risks to the reliability and security of the regional power grid.
Save the date: We look forward to seeing you at DTECH – Midwest, a new regional event taking place July 14-16, 2025 in Minneapolis, MN!
Midwest utilities face challenges from extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and the need to integrate renewable energy while maintaining grid reliability. Regulatory pressures to decarbonize add complexity, as utilities transition from fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives. They also grapple with supply chain issues, labor shortages, and cybersecurity risks. Balancing modernization efforts with affordable pricing, especially in both urban and rural areas, remains a significant challenge for the region.
The assessment identified six critical risks:
- Uncertain energy availability: Rapidly increasing electricity demand coupled with the early retirement of dispatchable generation resources poses a significant risk to grid reliability. This is the only risk in the “extreme” category because of the broad potential impact across the region, MRO said.
- Generation outages during extreme cold weather: Extreme weather events continue to challenge bulk power system operations.
- Nation-state threats: Cyber activities and strategic objectives of nation-state adversaries have elevated this to a high security risk in 2025.
- Supply chain compromise: Intentional, malicious manipulation of the supply chain can impact the availability and delivery of critical grid equipment, materials, and services.
- Malicious insider threats: The risk of an intentional insider attack on grid assets remains a significant security concern, MRO said.
- Inadequate inverter-based resource and distributed energy resource performance and modeling: The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources and distributed energy resources requires accurate modeling and performance to ensure grid stability.
“The risks highlighted in this report provide valuable insight into the challenges the industry faces and the policies and regulations that will help define a variety of proposed solutions,” said Richard Burt, senior vice president and chief operating officer. “This report, and others published by the ERO Enterprise, underscore the need for continued collaboration among all stakeholders to ensure a reliable and secure power grid.”
MRO, in partnership with its councils and industry experts, said it will address these risks through awareness campaigns, guidance development, and strategic mitigation efforts. They will become the primary focus for MRO’s 2025 activities as the organization develops action plans to manage risk.
