May is National Hurricane Preparedness Week is this week, an annual reminder that preparation and resilience efforts must begin well before hurricane season officially arrives. For utilities, that preparation is especially critical. Hurricanes and extreme weather events can threaten transmission and distribution infrastructure, disrupt fuel supply chains, create widespread outages, and challenge emergency response efforts across entire regions.
As utilities continue investing in grid hardening, resilience planning, vegetation management, emergency coordination, and customer communication strategies, it’s worth reflecting on the lessons learned from past storms and how they continue shaping utility operations today.
One powerful example comes from PSE&G’s response to Superstorm Sandy. In this recent Energy Central podcast, Paul Toscarelli, VP of Electric Operations at PSE&G, discusses how the storm became the catalyst for one of the country’s most ambitious resilience and storm-hardening initiatives — a $3 billion effort focused on preparing the grid for future extreme weather events.
Listen to the episode here: https://www.energycentral.com/podcasts/post/inside-pse-g-s-30b-plan-to-storm-proof-the-power-grid-0NZJjNwMZAsjZ2Z