Description
Energy availability, affordability, and carbon intensity are critical drivers of operational resilience, long-term cost exposure, and sustainability risk for businesses across the U.S. This dataset provides three rolled-up Energy Risk Scores: Power Supply, Electricity Price, and Carbon Intensity - each expressed on a standardized 0-100 scale with Low/Medium/High risk bands. The scores integrate current conditions and forward-looking projections (e.g., outages, transmission constraints, price trends, demand stress, and decarbonization trajectories) to support site selection, infrastructure planning, and climate-aligned investment decisions.
Technical Description
This Energy Risk dataset provides a standardized assessment of electricity-related risk across the conterminous United States, integrating historical observations and forward-looking projections into three composite pillars: Power Supply, Electricity Price, and Carbon Intensity. Each pillar is constructed from multiple underlying sublayers capturing distinct dimensions of risk, including grid reliability (outage frequency, duration, and severity), reserve margin adequacy, transmission expansion needs, data center-driven competition, baseline electricity prices, historical price drift, projected levelized cost of electricity, climate-driven peak demand stress (heating and cooling degree days), and grid carbon intensity today and under mid-case future trajectories. All sublayer inputs are transformed into normalized 0-1 indices using risk-class scaling or percentile ranking (state-, county-, or region-relative as appropriate), ensuring comparability across heterogeneous data sources and spatial resolutions.
Within each pillar, normalized sublayers are combined using predefined weights that reflect their relative contribution to near- and medium-term risk, producing continuous pillar scores that are rescaled to a 0-100 range. The methodology intentionally blends present-day conditions with projections to 2030-2035, emphasizing future exposure for planning and siting decisions rather than purely retrospective performance. Carbon risk, in particular, places greater weight on projected grid intensity to capture decarbonization momentum-or lack thereof-while supply and price pillars balance structural constraints, climate stressors, and market dynamics. To support interpretation and decision-making, each pillar score is further classified into Low, Medium, and High risk bands using percentile-based thresholds, and accompanied by narrative driver tags that identify the dominant contributors to risk. Together, these outputs provide a consistent, transparent, and scalable framework for evaluating energy resilience, cost exposure, and sustainability risk across the conterminous U.S.
Note that the data datetime (2026-01-01) represents the release date of the final data. The underlying geospatial datasets cover a wide time range spanning historical and projected time horizons.