2025 Regional Risk Assessment │ 2025 Regional Risk Assessment Executive Summary │ 2025 Regional Risk Assessment Infographic
Midwest Reliability Organization (MRO) released its 2025 Regional Risk Assessment (RRA) today, 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. 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 reliability and security of the regional power grid.
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.)
- 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 Threat: The risk of an intentional insider attack on grid assets remains a significant security concern.
- 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 to 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, will actively address these critical 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 and advance our vision of a highly reliable and secure North American bulk power system.
A webinar reviewing the 2025 RRA results is planned for February 5, 2025. Register here.
For questions on this release, contact [email protected]
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Midwest Reliability Organization (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. MRO is one of six regional entities in North America operating under authority from regulators in the United States through a delegation agreement with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and in Canada under similar arrangements. The primary focus of MRO is monitoring and enforcing compliance with mandatory reliability standards and assessing the grid’s ability to meet growing electricity demand.