In the wake of winter storms Elliott and Fern, utilities in the Tennessee Valley have taken different approaches toward building resilience, offering examples to those still planning for the next storm.

Billion-dollar weather disasters now strike the United States every 19 days, up from every 90 days in the 1980s. That shift explains why the conversation in the Tennessee Valley has moved from whether the centralized grid will fail to who is building the layer of resilience underneath it.

Two storms frame the story. Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022 broke the old model. Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, which left 230,000 Nashville Electric Service customers in the dark and took as long as 13 days to fully restore, confirmed that the distributed answer is no longer optional.

During Elliott, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) issued the first rolling blackouts in its history. Single-digit temperatures knocked 6.5 GW of generation offline, nearly 20% of peak demand, almost all of it coal and gas. TVA ordered all 153 local power companies to cut load, first by 5% and then by another 5% on Christmas Eve.

For EPB of Chattanooga, the municipal utility serving roughly 200,000 meters and half a million people across Hamilton County, that 10% meant shedding about 130 MW against a peak of around 1,300 MW.

EPB’s leadership drew a line. “I don’t want to expose our customers like this again,” is how Jason Read, who leads the utility’s energy operations and field engineering, describes the board’s response. “We will be ready the next time this happens.” Elliott became the genesis of a battery program that had begun years earlier as a TVA-encouraged virtual power plant experiment and now anchors the utility’s resilience strategy.

Read the full article at nacleanenergy.com.