Energy & Emergency Planning Integration Crosswalk for the Midwest
Energy security defines the condition of having enough energy to meet demand while maintaining a power system protected against physical and cyber threats, and it underpins national security, economic competitiveness, and community wellbeing. For Midwestern states, the stakes have never been higher. The region’s electric grid faces unprecedented electricity demand growth, increasingly frequent and severe weather events, and a growing threat landscape of physical and cyber attacks that strain infrastructure and test the limits of existing planning processes.
Why This Matters
Meeting these challenges requires more than individual organizations’ action. Effective energy security planning demands a complete understanding of grid conditions, future risk projections, and the interdependencies between the public and private sector organizations that plan, operate, and regulate the system. No single organization holds that visibility; building it requires coordinated, integrated planning across state agencies, utilities, regulators, and emergency management partners.
About The Framework
The Energy and Emergency Planning Integration Crosswalk (EEPIC) addresses this challenge. Stemming from the success of the Midwestern Governors Association’s MID-GRID Initiative, the framework supports multi-stakeholder energy security planning at both state and regional scales. It does not replace existing plans or regulatory requirements: it gives states a structured resource to align their policy goals, regulatory authorities, and planning processes into a single cohesive approach for all stakeholders to use. The framework builds on the plans, policies, and procedures states and their partners already have, and scales to each state’s specific context and priorities.
At the foundation of the framework are three Energy Security Strategies that shape how a state approaches its planning: diversification, the desire to reduce dependence on any single energy source; economics, which uses financial perspectives to mitigate risk and encourage infrastructure investment; and resilience, which uses technology and other processes to enhance system survivability. The strategy chosen by the state becomes the lens through which it reads and applies the framework, shaping how it engages with each module in a way that reflects its unique goals and planning priorities.
How It Was Developed
This framework was developed over two years through an Advisory Group of subject matter experts drawn from across the Midwestern energy and emergency management landscape, including energy offices, public utilities commissions, ISO/RTOs, utilities, and emergency management. The group used biannual workshops to assess needs, refine topics, and establish the scope and structure of the framework, and then used monthly meetings to fine-tune content against their real planning experience. This process shaped the framework into a resource built for the realities of state energy security planning work.
Have questions about the framework or how to implement it in your organization? Reach out to the MGA team at
jewart@midwesterngovernors.org.
Supporting Documents: Start Here Before The Modules
The User Guide and Implementation Plan are foundational to using the framework effectively. Read the User Guide first to assess the Energy Security Strategies and understand module navigation. The Implementation Plan covers how to deploy the framework within your organization.
User Guide
The User Guide orients planners to the EEPIC Framework, explaining how to navigate it, providing detailed descriptions of the Energy Security Strategies, and outlining the framework modules. It walks users through each strategy, covering the policy levers, planning objectives, and stakeholder considerations each one brings into the planning process. It also explains how the chosen strategy shapes the way users engage with the modules. Planners should read the UserGuide first to choose an Energy Security Strategy before engaging any module.
Implementation Plan
The Implementation Plan provides a practical roadmap for putting the EEPIC into action, giving states the guidance needed to move from understanding the framework to actively using it. It follows a four-step process — strategy development, module engagement, planning and gap analysis, and integration and maintenance — and outlines the key actions to take, the right stakeholders to involve, and the outcomes to target at each step. The plan gives states a flexible structure they can adapt to their specific context and shape their planning effort from start to finish.
Framework Modules: Four Modules, One Planning Arc
Design and integration focuses on how energy stakeholders — states, utilities, and federal partners — can align their priorities for energy planning to support infrastructure development. A core challenge in grid planning is that state policy goals don’t always translate into enforceable design criteria, leaving utilities without clear direction and producing inconsistent infrastructure outcomes across the system.
Differing priorities deepen this disconnect: states focus on long-term policy outcomes while utilities prioritize reliability and costs, fragmenting planning and delaying needed investment. This module guides planners through identifying stakeholders involved in grid design, the levers available to advance their strategy, and how that strategy translates into executing specific design priorities — enabling states to move from policy goals to actionable infrastructure design decisions.
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The module guides planners through a five-step process covering national case studies, stakeholder mapping, implementation efforts, strategy-specific design priorities, and resource adequacy.
Module Goals
✔ Help state offices achieve their energy goals through improved infrastructure planning processes.
✔ Translate each energy security strategy into specific design priorities across all levels of the grid: distribution, transmission, and generation.
✔ Connect energy security strategy selection to concrete grid design priorities, understanding what implementation looks like in practice.
Energy risk and criticality defines the potential for energy infrastructure assets to face impact from natural and man-made hazards, while accounting for characteristics such as redundancy and historical performance. Because there is no uniform method for assessing risk, states and utilities define and prioritize hazards differently, creating inconsistent planning approaches that leave critical gaps in how energyinfrastructure risks are addressed. The lack of clarity in determining asset criticality further compounds these gaps, leaving planners without a consistent way to identify which assets are most essential to protect or restore. This module addresses these challenges through completion of the Consolidated Risk Spectrum, a standardized multi-step process that gives states and their partners a common foundation for assessing and defining system-level risk.
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The module guides planners through the four-step process of the Consolidated Risk Spectrum: understanding how the energy security strategy shapes how risk is defined, aligning findings of disparate risk assessment processes, analyzing the various dimensions of energy risk, and determining asset criticality based on those risk dimensions.
Module Goals
✔ Explain how organizations can define risk for their own critical infrastructure.
✔ Improve methods of identifying and mitigating risk, especially regarding interregional connections.
✔ Navigate various risk tolerances across multiple organizations
Restoration prioritization addresses how the order in which electricity customers receive power following an outage determines the extent of impact on public health and safety and economic activity. Utilities hold primary responsibility for restoration decisions, which a mix of
technical constraints, contractual obligations, and community needs shape — and state leaders sometimes don’t know these plans exist. Meanwhile, the state is able to exercise emergency authorities that override utilities’ restoration priorities. Without a shared framework for
determining priorities, this disconnect between utility operational decisions and government emergency priorities produces inconsistent restoration outcomes that can deepen the impact of an outage on the people and functions that state needs to protect. This module guides planners through the Prioritization Crosswalk, a process that integrates state energy strategies, grid conditions, and government authorities into a shared framework for establishing state-level restoration criteria.
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The module guides planners through the Prioritization Crosswalk, a four-step process covering stakeholder roles in setting restoration priorities, the physical and operational grid characteristics that shape decisions, identification of existing plans and process, and application of the state energy security strategy.
Module Goals
✔ Understand how effective prioritization can reduce the impact of grid outages.
✔ Develop an integrated, state-level method for identifying and communicating priorities to utilities
Interdependency planning addresses the operational relationship between critical infrastructure sectors and the electric grid, recognizing that disruptions don’t occur in isolation and cascading failures across sectors can negatively impact grid operations and worsen outages. A core gap in energy and emergency planning is that while all critical infrastructure sectors depend on the grid, the inverse varies. Further, stakeholders can’t always see which assets within sectors most directly support grid operations until a real-world failure exposes them due to
technical, regulatory, or legal constraints. This gap leaves emergency response plans incomplete, leaving planners without a clear picture of how degradation in one sector triggers failures in another. This module closes that gap by guiding planners to examine the specific assets in
sectors that most directly support grid operations, equipping states to build more robust emergency response strategies that account for cross-sector risk, as explored through the lens of three FEMA Critical Lifeline sectors: communications, energy, and transportation.
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The module guides planners through each lifeline sector, outlining the assets most critical to grid operations, the impacts of their disruptions, and how each energy security strategy shapes planning priorities within that sector.
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Module Goals
✔ Evaluate the interdependency planning concerns of critical lifeline sectors based on their support of grid operations
✔ Support strengthened cross-sector emergency planning and coordination.
✔ Understand how power outages along critical lifeline sectors impact grid operations.
Foundational Strategies: The Strategic Context Behind The Framework
Selecting an Energy Security Strategy is the first and most consequential step in using the EEPIC. The strategy chosen by the state becomes the guiding principle that drives how you approach legislation, policy, planning, and operations, and it’s the lens through which each module is read and applied. Each of the three strategies offers distinct benefits that states can apply as a driver for energy planning. Learn more about each strategy below, and how to select the right one for your state in the User Guide.
Diversification
Diversification reduces dependence on any single energy resource by incorporating a mix of generation types and fuel sources into the
system. A diverse energy mix mitigates risks associated with supply chain disruptions, price volatility, and regulatory changes by ensuring the
system continues functioning when any one resource is unavailable. For states pursuing this strategy, the focus is on ensuring planning
decisions build toward flexibility and optionality in grid design.
Economics
The economic strategy uses the financial perspective for risk mitigation by prioritizing investment in large-scale infrastructure and energy sources that deliver the greatest system value. System reliance on a particular asset, or public and private sector stakeholder priorities, drive the specific infrastructure decisions. For states pursuing this strategy, the focus is on making infrastructure improvements financially viable for energy asset owners and operators.
Resilience
Resilience promotes the innovative use of technology, tools, and processes to reduce risk and enhance the ability of the system to sustain
critical functions under stress. A state’s current and future risk profile and system capabilities determine the level of resilience it should
achieve and the methods for getting there. For states pursuing this strategy, the focus is on protecting infrastructure and maintaining
operability and service through degraded conditions.
Past Work
The EEPIC reflects multiple iterations of collaborative development, shaped through a series of workshops, working sessions, and
stakeholder engagement. Each event brought the Advisory Group together to assess needs and refine framework content. The archive holds
agendas and recordings from each session, tracing the framework’s development.
Browse agendas and recordings from past sessions.