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Extreme weather is making the grid more prone to outages — and now FirstEnergy’s three Ohio utilities want more leeway on their reliability requirements.
Put simply, FirstEnergy is asking the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to let Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., Ohio Edison, and Toledo Edison take longer to restore power when the lights go out. The latter two utilities would also be allowed slightly more frequent outages per customer each year.
Comments regarding the request are due to the utilities commission on Dec. 8, less than three weeks after regulators approved higher electricity rates for hundreds of thousands of northeast Ohio utility customers. An administrative trial, known as an evidentiary hearing, is currently set to start Jan. 21.
Consumer and environmental advocates say it’s unfair to make customers shoulder the burden of lower-quality service, as they have already been paying for substantial grid-hardening upgrades.
“Relaxing reliability standards can jeopardize the health and safety of Ohio consumers,” said Maureen Willis, head of the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, which is the state’s legal representative for utility customers. “It also shifts the costs of more frequent and longer outages onto Ohioans who already paid millions of dollars to utilities to enhance and develop their distribution systems.”
The United States has seen a rise in blackouts linked to severe weather, a 2024 analysis by Climate Central found, with about twice as many such events happening from 2014 through 2023 compared to the 10 years from 2000 through 2009.
The duration of the longest blackouts has also grown. As of mid-2025, the average length of 12.8 hours represents a jump of almost 60% from 2022, J.D. Power reported in October.
Ohio regulators have approved less stringent reliability standards before, notably for AES Ohio and Duke Energy Ohio, where obligations from those or other orders required investments and other actions to improve reliability.
Some utilities elsewhere in the country have also sought leeway on reliability expectations. In April, for example, two New York utilities asked to exclude some outages related to tree disease and other factors from their performance metrics, which would in effect relax their standards.
Other utilities haven’t necessarily pursued lower targets, but have nonetheless noted vulnerabilities to climate change or experienced more major events that don’t count toward requirements.
FirstEnergy’s case is particularly notable because the company has slow-rolled clean energy and energy efficiency, two tools that advocates say can cost-effectively bolster grid reliability and guard against weather-related outages.
There is also a certain irony to the request: FirstEnergy’s embrace of fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy and efficiency measures has let its subsidiaries’ operations and others continue to emit high levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide. Now, the company appears to nod toward climate-change-driven weather variability as justification for relaxed reliability standards.
FirstEnergy filed its application to the Public Utilities Commission last December, while its recently decided rate case and other cases linked to its House Bill 6 corruption scandal were pending. FirstEnergy argues that specific reliability standards for each of its utilities should start with an average of the preceding five years’ performance. From there, FirstEnergy says the state should tack on extra allowances for longer or more frequent outages to “account for annual variability in factors outside the Companies’ control, in particular, weather impacts that can vary significantly on a year-to-year basis.”
“Honestly, I don’t know of a viable hypothesis for this increasing variability outside of climate change,” said Victoria Petryshyn, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Southern California, who grew up in Ohio.
In summer, systems are burdened by constant air-conditioning use during periods of extreme heat and humidity. In winter, frigid air masses resulting from disruptions to the jet stream can boost demand for heat and “cause extra strain on the grid if natural-gas lines freeze,” Petryshyn said.
“All the weather becomes supercharged,” Petryshyn said. “We can all expect stronger storms, stronger winds, and more frequent extreme weather that threatens grid stability.”
FirstEnergy has a long history of obstructing measures that would both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and alleviate stress on the power grid.
In February 2024, the company abandoned its interim 2030 goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and said it would continue running two West Virginia coal plants. Before that, FirstEnergy backed plans to weaken Ohio’s energy-efficiency goals. And during the first Trump administration, the company urged the Department of Energy to use emergency powers to keep unprofitable coal and nuclear plants running.
FirstEnergy also spent roughly $60 million on efforts to get lawmakers to pass and protect House Bill 6, the law at the heart of Ohio’s largest utility corruption scandal. HB 6’s nuclear and coal bailouts have since been repealed, but the state’s clean-energy standards remain gutted.
Meanwhile, regulators have let FirstEnergy’s utilities charge customers millions of dollars for grid modernization, “which are supposed to support the utility’s ability to adapt and improve the electric grid to rigging challenges from climate change,” said Karin Nordstrom, a clean-energy attorney with the Ohio Environmental Council.
“However, FirstEnergy has not provided the same investment in energy-efficiency programs, which can help manage rising demand at lower cost than expensive capital investment,” Nordstrom said. FirstEnergy should fully exhaust those tools and customer-funded grid-modernization investments before regulators relax the company’s requirements, she added.
Limited transparency makes FirstEnergy’s plan even more problematic, according to Shay Banton, a regulatory program engineer and energy justice policy advocate for the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Earlier this year, Banton reported on grid disparities in FirstEnergy’s service territories that leave some areas more prone to outages.
“It feels too early for them to request leniency without proposing or implementing more comprehensive mitigations based on a detailed understanding of the root cause,” Banton said.
It’s also likely that FirstEnergy’s rate increase of nearly $76 million for Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co.’s roughly 745,000 customers, approved on Nov. 19, already accounts for some weather-related factors. This summer, spokesperson Hannah Catlett told Canary Media that “the Illuminating Co. service territory generally sees bigger storm impacts” than areas served by FirstEnergy’s other Ohio utilities.
“Our request to adjust the reliability standards is not a step back in our commitment,” Catlett told Canary Media this fall. “We are confident in the progress underway and remain focused on improving reliability through continued investment in the communities we are privileged to serve.”
But fundamentally, additional leeway for weather variation is unnecessary, said Ashley Brown, a former Ohio utility commissioner and former executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group. Averaging utility performance over several years — the way most regulators do as part of setting reliability standards — should already account for that.
“In fact, the standard should always be going up,” Brown added. “You should expect more productivity from the company.”
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