Walk into almost any utility meeting in the US at the moment and the first topic on the table is the same: customer bills. Even in regions once defined by ambitious clean-energy programs, affordability has become the dominant pressure point. Rising costs, rate scrutiny, and customer expectations have pushed it to the forefront of decision making.
Utilities have long described their mission as balancing affordability, environmental responsibility, and reliability. The three-legged stool metaphor is a powerful way to illustrate the delicate balance utilities must strike between these three legs of their mission. If any one of those legs weakens, the system becomes harder to manage.
The stool itself isn’t new to the industry, but how unevenly the weight is being placed on it is. Affordability is carrying far more of the load right now, even though it is shaped – often decisively – by what’s happening with the other two legs.
According to the US Energy Information Administration and Choose Energy, US residential electricity bills increased from $1,500/year in 2022 to $1,920/year in 2025 – a 28% increase. This is due in part to rate increases and increased electrification of loads like heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and EVs.
With roughly 128 million homes in the US, American households will spend about $245 billion on electricity this year. When affordability becomes the central concern for that many people, it naturally becomes a central concern for the utilities serving them.
The other two legs are still attached to the stool
Even if the national conversation has narrowed to costs, the operational pressures haven’t.
Start with environmental impacts. CO₂ emissions from the electricity sector carried an estimated social cost of more than $79 billion in 2022 according to US EPA. Add the criteria pollutants associated with natural-gas use in US homes, and the total environmental magnitude reaches about $81.35 billion.
These costs shape planning horizons, regulatory expectations, and long-term investment decisions, whether or not they are explicitly in focus.
Then consider reliability. Outages cost the US economy between $100-150 billion each year according to the US Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Utilities see that translated into restoration work, customer frustration, capital expenditure pressure, and, in many cases, requirements for additional resilience investments.
Together, these forces mean affordability is never just about cost control. It’s interconnected with the environmental and reliability pressures that utilities face every day.
When one leg dominates, the stool becomes unstable
Utilities know better than anyone that focusing too narrowly on a single priority creates risk.
Drive costs down aggressively and reliability can suffer. Accelerate clean-technology investment without system flexibility and you can create affordability challenges. Build heavily for resilience without optimising existing assets and you can introduce long-term inefficiencies and increased customer rate pressure.
Right now, affordability is the loudest of the three priorities because customers are feeling the strain directly. But the forces behind sustainability and reliability have not gone dormant. They continue to influence cost structures and planning choices in the background, and they will almost certainly return to the foreground in the coming years.
Avoiding single-issue solutions
This moment calls for solutions that help utilities manage affordability today without constraining their ability to respond when sustainability or reliability rises again in priority. They need future-proof solutions.
That means designing programs and system architectures that support adaptability. Flexibility is becoming a strategic capability: the ability to adjust how assets are used, how load is shaped, how distributed resources are coordinated, and how operational decisions balance competing pressures.
Many utilities already have the building blocks for this flexibility: demand-side programs, DERs, control systems, operational data, forecasting tools. What’s often missing is a way for these pieces to work together to create shared value across the three priorities.
Some utilities are beginning to adopt what can be thought of as a value-orchestration approach: using decision tools and operational platforms to align these elements rather than manage them in silos.
Planning for the next turn of the cycle
Affordability deserves its place at the top of the agenda right now. Customers are watching their bills closely, and utilities are responding with pragmatism and care. But history in this sector is cyclical. Reliability crises emerge. Environmental expectations grow. New technologies reshape what customers need and expect from the grid.
The utilities planning most effectively today are the ones preparing for those shifts, by keeping all three legs of the stool strong enough to carry weight when their moment comes back around. In a landscape where those three priorities rise and fall, adaptability is the closest thing the industry has to stability and being future-proof.
