Planning Under Uncertainty: Navigating Market, Policy, and Technology Shifts

EPRI's 44^th Annual Seminar on Resource Planning for Electric Power Systems
Tuesday-Wednesday, November 5-6, 2025 | EPRI Offices, Washington, D.C.

Now in its 44^th year, this long-running annual EPRI seminar explores key topics and issues of growing urgency to electric company generation, transmission and distribution system planners; integrated system planners; fuel and asset managers; and staff engaged in corporate sustainability, resource portfolio strategy, and risk management. For 2025, the seminar is again running as an in-person event (approximately 50 participants) at EPRI's Washington, DC offices.

The seminar is organized and hosted by EPRI's Program 178 on Resource Planning for Electric Power Systems. The event delivers and expands upon EPRI research, and features presentations by EPRI staff and external experts from government, industry, academia, and non-profit organizations along with facilitated discussion among all participants. This invitation-only, interactive event is designed to facilitate significant interaction between the participants and session speakers, as is customarily run under Chatham House Rule.

This year’s seminar features four sessions across two days, exploring the art and science of IRPs, pricing dynamics of generation technologies, insights from real-world storage deployments, and strategies for integrated planning. The program further highlights the transformative role of AI, automation, and data analytics in modernizing planning processes. Specifically, the seminar will cover:

• The art and science of the IRP. This session will examine how Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) balance the technical rigor of modeling with the practical realities of policy, stakeholder engagement, and community needs. Discussions will focus on aligning affordability, equity, and reliability goals with flexible strategies that can adapt to uncertainty in markets, policies, and technologies, highlighting both analytical methods and real-world applications.
• Storage in the Field. This session will focus on insights from current utility-scale storage projects. Speakers will share lessons on deployment challenges, operational outcomes, and evolving roles of storage in supporting reliability, flexibility, and decarbonization goals.
• Understanding Pricing Drivers. This session will explore the key factors shaping resource cost trajectories, including generation technology prices, supply chain constraints, tariffs, and the evolving economics of emerging technologies. Discussions will address how uncertainty in these drivers influences planning assumptions, investment strategies, and long-term portfolio decisions.
• Modernizing Planning through Technology and Data. This session will examine how emerging tools such as AI, automation, and advanced analytics are transforming resource planning into a smarter, faster, and more adaptive process. Speakers will discuss practical applications, opportunities, and challenges of leveraging technology and data to improve forecasting, streamline decision-making, and enhance computational performance.
• Integrated Planning in Practice. This session will focus on strategies for aligning generation, transmission, and distribution planning to create an integrated plan. Panelists will share approaches for bridging organizational silos and time horizons, highlighting real-world examples of integrated planning that balance reliability, cost, operations, and decarbonization objectives.

Goal

Members of EPRI Program 178 (Resource Planning for Electric Power Systems), Project Set 178A (Energy System Technology Cost and Performance), and Project Set 178B (Integrated Energy Systems Planning).

EPRI members and others who participate in this seminar include investor-owned utilities (IOUs), electric generation and transmissions cooperatives (G&Ts), independent power producers (IPPs), public power agencies, and regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and Independent System Operators (ISOs)

All participants are typically engaged in conducting long-term system resource planning analyses, acquiring fuels for power plants, managing power plant operations, advising on corporate sustainability strategy, and/or developing corporate risk management strategies.

Additional participants typically include invited federal agency staff from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), EPA, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), state public utility commissions (PUCs), academic experts, and representatives of national environmental and other public interest organizations.

Past Keynote Presentations

Joseph DeCarolis, Administrator, U.S. Energy Information Administration (2024)
Anuja Ratnayake, Former Managing Director, Integrated System Operations & Planning, Duke Energy (2023)
Judith Jagdmann, President, National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (2022)
Richard Glick, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (2021)
Bernard McNamee, Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (2020)
Melanie Kenderdine, Principal, Energy Futures Initiative (2018)

Event Committee

Agendas from previous years:

• 2024 Agenda
• 2023 Agenda
• 2022 Agenda
• 2021 Agenda