Dr. Matthew Green is Senior Vice President at TRC. He has more than two decades of experience driving transformative energy initiatives.

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In my prior article for Forbes, I discussed how the U.S. power grid is being strained to its limits because of a perfect storm of pressures on the aging electrical infrastructure. The electric power industry is approximately 5% of the U.S. GDP, but it is the first 5% because all other industries rely on it. The core of the U.S. power grid was largely built when most people still watched TV in black and white, and a large portion of this infrastructure is either approaching the end of its usable life or is already well past its intended lifecycle. That aging infrastructure is also being tested with challenges it was never designed to face, including skyrocketing demand, accelerating security threats, extreme weather events and increasing systemic vulnerabilities.​

​Our power grid has never been this vulnerable, and that poses a growing threat to the entire U.S. economy. Those risks make grid modernization an urgent issue not only for the utility industry and government officials, but for every leader in the business community.​

We need to modernize the grid in ways that truly meet the needs of our economy. ​Incremental change is not enough. Bolder steps are required to truly address the scale and urgency of this issue, and that includes a fundamentally new approach to the way the utility industry conducts planning for the grid.

​For decades, the utility industry has used deterministic forecasting as its strategy for grid planning.​

Deterministic planning worked well when demand growth was slow, steady and highly predictable. That approach works as long as the variables are small, the unknowns are few and reality does not shift away from the rigid underlying assumptions in your plan. But what happens when change accelerates, the variables become volatile and every week brings more unknowns?​

Those conditions are fundamentally at odds with deterministic planning. And the power grid is now facing them at an unprecedented scale.​

Those traditional, deterministic planning processes require rigid assumptions with few variables and a low rate of change. That approach quickly falls apart when reality shifts away from those rigid assumptions, which is why traditional utility planning processes are struggling now as they face rapid change on so many fronts. Those changes include skyrocketing load projections, unpredictable demand patterns, climate change-driven natural disasters, the rising use of distributed energy resources, changing load characteristics, growing grid complexity and the impact of new technologies.

We need a new approach to managing this critical infrastructure for our economy, but what is the alternative to deterministic planning? The answer is probabilistic, systems-based planning, which is built for adaptability for changing variables and unexpected challenges. This planning model bases decisions on probabilities for a range of variables, rates of change and potential outcomes—all across a wide range of scenarios. And probabilistic planning can also pivot quickly as circumstances change, allowing utilities to be far more nimble.​