Wildfires, record heat, and a grid under more strain than ever have turned “resilience” from a buzzword into one of the fastest-growing categories in energy technology. Host Elisa Wood talks with Julia Hamm — who spent nearly 20 years growing the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) before becoming a partner at The Ad Hoc Group — about how resilience became its own market, the AI cameras and wildfire-spread software utilities are deploying today, why microgrids are still an emerging (not mainstream) resilience play, and why the length of the utility sales cycle remains startups’ biggest obstacle. They also discuss why Julia launched the Power Resilience Forum to keep this conversation from being crowded out by the AI and data-center load-growth story dominating the industry right now.
About the Guest
Julia Hamm, Partner, The Ad Hoc Group
Julia Hamm has spent more than 25 years at the center of the utility industry. She joined the organization that would become the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) in 1999 as a consultant, then became SEPA’s first full-time employee in January 2004, when the organization’s board faced a choice between hiring dedicated staff or dissolving. Over the following 19 years, she led SEPA’s growth from a struggling organization into one with roughly 50 staff and about 1,200 members — 750 of them electric utilities. Under her leadership, SEPA rebranded from the Solar Electric Power Association to the Smart Electric Power Alliance in 2015, merged with the Association for Demand Response and Smart Grid the same year and with the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel in 2017, and broadened its focus from solar to the full range of utility decarbonization and resilience issues. In 2010, she spun out SEPA’s trade show business in partnership with the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA); that business is now RE+.
Julia left SEPA at the end of 2022. She had already been a senior advisor to The Ad Hoc Group — an advisory firm founded in 2016 by Jim Kapsis, a former Opower regulatory executive — for two years before leaving SEPA, and became a full partner two years later. At Ad Hoc, she works directly with resilience-technology companies (roughly two-thirds startups, one-third growth-stage or public companies) and spends about half her time meeting one-on-one with utility executives to understand their technology needs. She is also the host of the Power Resilience Forum, an event she launched to give grid resilience its own dedicated venue apart from the broader conversation about AI and data-center load growth.
Timestamped Topic Map
0:00
Cold open: active wildfire season and record heat set the stage for a resilience conversation
1:19
Introducing Julia Hamm and her long history in the energy industry
2:01
How Julia fell into the energy industry by accident a year after college
3:19
The 2004 turning point: SEPA’s board asks Julia to become its first employee or dissolve the organization
4:34
What SEPA looked like when Julia left in 2022: 50 staff, ~1,200 members, the RE+ trade show spinout
6:23
Advice for young professionals: stop trying to recreate the wheel
7:45
Why the people you surround yourself with matter more as an organization matures
8:43
Newsletter break: subscribe to the Energy Changemakers newsletter
9:51
Why joining The Ad Hoc Group isn’t the opposite of SEPA — it’s the other side of the coin
10:21
Background on The Ad Hoc Group, founder Jim Kapsis, and its roots at Opower
11:22
How Julia splits her time between utility executives and Ad Hoc’s client companies
12:40
Why grid resilience wasn’t a real market category a couple of decades ago
13:12
Florida Power & Light and the 2006–2007 origins of resilience planning after seven hurricanes in 18 months
14:35
Wildfire risk and utility bankruptcy liability drive explosive growth in the category since 2017–2018
15:51
Extreme temperature swings, cybersecurity, and state-mandated resiliency and wildfire mitigation plans
17:17
The shift toward all-hazard, multi-hazard technology solutions
17:45
Distinguishing grid resilience from resource adequacy and load growth
18:48
How tech companies use utility resilience filings to identify sales opportunities
20:28
Mapping the resilience technology landscape: eight to ten distinct categories
20:28
Weather data providers entering the utility market
20:57
Situational awareness: Pano AI’s smoke-detection cameras deployed with Xcel Energy and Portland General Electric
22:40
Wildfire spread modeling with Technosylva, and how it informs crew pre-positioning and long-term investment
23:33
Moving from cyclical to risk-based vegetation management
25:32
Grid sectionalization to limit the scope and duration of outages
26:06
Microgrids as an emerging (but not yet mature) resilience play
26:45
Rebuilding high wildfire-risk areas as microgrids instead of restringing power lines
27:08
Green Mountain Power’s home-battery model: utility-owned storage that islands during outages
27:57
CenterPoint Energy’s resilience-as-a-service pilot for commercial and industrial customers in Texas
28:40
The biggest headache for resilience startups: the length of the utility sales cycle
29:33
Why resilience has to be treated as a continuous, decades-long investment, not a one-time fix
31:15
Why Julia launched the Power Resilience Forum: giving resilience its own stage apart from the AI and data-center load-growth conversation
32:34
Closing and how to subscribe to Energy Changemakers
Key Takeaways by Audience
Policymakers and regulators
Resilience investment cannot be treated as a one-time appropriation; Julia points to Florida Power & Light’s continuous, nearly 20-year investment cycle as the model regulators should expect utilities to sustain.
As more states require resiliency and wildfire mitigation plan filings (Texas is cited as a leading example), regulators are being asked to evaluate technology and investment choices they may not yet have a framework for assessing.
The surge of attention on data-center and AI-driven load growth risks crowding out the resilience conversation in policy venues — a dynamic that prompted Julia to launch a forum dedicated solely to resilience.
Utilities
Vendors are moving away from single-hazard tools; solutions that address wildfire, flood, wind, and extreme temperature together are easier to justify on ROI grounds.
Risk-based vegetation management and AI-enabled detection (like Pano AI’s cameras) can catch ignitions long before a 911 call, changing crew pre-positioning and evacuation planning.
Utility-owned distributed assets — Green Mountain Power’s home batteries, CenterPoint’s commercial and industrial microgrid pilot — let a utility capture day-to-day grid value from an asset that also delivers customer resilience during outages.
DER and resilience-tech developers
The single biggest headache startups face is the length of the utility sales cycle, which frequently conflicts with venture-backed growth timelines.
Utilities increasingly file resiliency and wildfire mitigation plans that describe the technology attributes they intend to invest in — startups that read these filings closely can identify qualified sales targets.
In other cases, a utility has already chosen its technology partner before filing, and the plan functions as regulatory approval; here, the vendor’s role shifts to helping the utility educate the regulator.
Investors
Venture capital has historically been hesitant to back companies selling only to utilities, given the slow path to traction — a structural tension for anyone financing resilience-tech startups.
Julia notes that resilience-tech spans a wide range of maturity, from 100-plus-year-old companies bringing new products to utilities, to early-stage startups — due diligence should account for very different growth trajectories within the same category.
Local governments and emergency management
Wildfire spread-analysis tools (such as those from Technosylva) inform not just utility operations but pre-positioning of firefighting resources and evacuation decisions.
Microgrids sited in high wildfire-risk areas — rather than rebuilt overhead lines — are emerging as a lower-cost, higher-resilience option for the highest-risk parts of a service territory.
General listeners
The term “resilience” as a distinct utility planning category is barely 20 years old, tracing to Florida Power & Light’s response to seven hurricanes in an 18-month span in 2004–2005.
Grid resilience and the current AI/data-center load-growth story are related but separate conversations — one is about hardening the grid against disruption, the other is about having enough capacity to meet new demand.
The used the phrase “one ignition away from bankruptcy” to capture how directly wildfire liability now shapes utility decision-making.
Glossary of Terms
SEPA (Smart Electric Power Alliance)
Nonprofit membership organization focused on the intersection of utilities and distributed/renewable energy; originally the Solar Electric Power Association, rebranded in 2015 after merging with the Association for Demand Response and Smart Grid, and again in 2017 with the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel.
RE+
The renewable energy trade show and events business (formerly Solar Power International) that SEPA spun out in 2010 in partnership with the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).
The Ad Hoc Group
An advisory firm, founded in 2016 by Jim Kapsis, that helps climate-tech and energy startups navigate the regulated utility market; roughly two-thirds of its clients are startups, with the remainder growth-stage or public companies.
Grid resilience
A utility’s ability to withstand and quickly recover from disruptive events (wildfire, storms, extreme heat/cold, cyberattack) with minimal customer impact; distinct from resource adequacy, which concerns having enough generation capacity to meet demand.
Wildfire mitigation plan
A regulator-mandated filing in which a utility details the steps it will take to reduce the risk that its equipment ignites a wildfire; may stand alone or be filed as part of a broader resiliency plan.
All-hazard / multi-hazard technology
Resilience solutions designed to address more than one threat category (e.g., wildfire, flood, wind, extreme cold) rather than a single hazard, which utilities increasingly require to justify the investment.
Situational awareness technology
Tools such as AI-enabled cameras and sensors that give utilities real-time visibility into emerging risks, including early wildfire smoke detection.
Wildfire spread analysis
Software that models how a wildfire would spread from a given ignition point based on real-time weather, wind, and ground conditions, used for both live incident response and long-term planning.
Risk-based vegetation management
An approach to tree-trimming that targets the highest-risk trees and areas based on species, weather, and historical outage data, replacing the traditional practice of trimming an entire service territory on a fixed multi-year cycle.
Sectionalization
Grid design and technology that limits an outage to the smallest possible group of customers rather than allowing a fault to cascade across a wider area.
Microgrid
A localized grid that can operate connected to or disconnected (”islanded”) from the main grid, allowing continued power delivery during a broader outage.
Resilience as a service
A model in which a utility owns and operates on-site generation or storage (such as a microgrid) at a customer’s location, using it for grid benefit most of the time while reserving it for the customer’s backup power during outages.
Resource adequacy
The question of whether a grid has sufficient generation and capacity to meet demand, including new load growth from data centers and AI — a related but distinct issue from resilience.
Integrated Resource Plan (IRP)
A utility’s long-term plan for meeting customer demand; referenced in the episode as a point of comparison for how tech companies read utility resiliency filings.
