2026 Energy Resilience Roundtable for U.S. Territories, Alaska & Hawaiʻi

Energy supports daily life, economic opportunity, and public safety, and its importance is never clearer than when the power goes out. That is why ensuring resilient, reliable and affordable energy is a leading priority for every governor. For U.S. territories and states with remote and isolated power grids, such as Alaska and Hawaiʻi, geography and topography present unique challenges. Events that may have minimal impact on the bulk power grid could result in delays of weeks or months in islanded communities. Further, these communities are highly dependent on diesel fuel and are vulnerable to historically tight supplies and high prices that also affect the rest of the country. To address these challenges, the governors of the five U.S. territories, Alaska and Hawaiʻi are actively working to bolster resilience efforts, increase the reliability of their power systems and lower costs for their communities.

Building on the 2024 and 2025 iterations of the Energy Resilience Roundtable, NGA reconvened cross-functional state and territory leaders in energy, homeland security, emergency management and territorial power authorities Sept.15 in Anchorage, Alaska. This event featured governor-designated teams from Alaska, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Guam, Hawai'i, and Puerto Rico, all coming together to discuss challenges and share promising resilience practices.

NGA hosted this roundtable with support from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) and in close partnership with Alaska Gov Mike Dunleavy and his staff. Also in attendance were officials from DOE CESER, the DOE Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), along with other subject-matter experts.

While the energy market has always been difficult to navigate, the territories, Alaska, and Hawaiʻi raised additional challenges that have exacerbated the situation in 2026, including:

• Increased global electricity and fuel costs have been particularly difficult for these communities given their remote geographies and dependence on imported diesel and heating fuels.
• It has also been an active storm season in the Pacific, with the first named storm occurring in January, the earliest start since 2019, and forecasters projecting typhoon activity roughly 60% above historical averages. This included back-to-back typhoons affecting CNMI (Super Typhoons Sinlaku and Bavi) and Guam. The storm season has also been active in Hawaiʻi, including Hurricane Lala in August and Hurricane Lowell in September; the latter led to extensive power outages across Kauaʻi.

Through a discussion-based forum, state and territory leaders explored a wide range of unique issue sets facing remote and islanded communities, including:

• Emerging market dynamics, from geopolitical disruptions to distributed generation and storage, and what they mean for energy planning;
• Securing energy infrastructure in an age of advancing cyber threats;
• Coordinating to protect defense-critical energy infrastructure (DCEI) through a whole-of-government approach;
• Building and retaining a skilled energy and emergency-response workforce in remote and islanded communities;
• Identifying funding streams to strengthen financing pipelines for resilient energy infrastructure; and
• Bolstering preparedness, response, and recovery through lessons learned from recent events.

A key theme arose throughout the day: How do we increase resilience and reduce recovery times after energy interruptions, especially for communities at the "end of the line," meaning those at the farthest point of energy-delivery infrastructure?

More takeaways from the roundtable can be found below:

Advancing Energy Resilience

Territories and islanded communities are actively working to address the unique energy-resilience challenges they face. Their remote geographies contribute to higher fuel prices, and their geographic proximity to tropical cyclone hot spots results in systems that face difficult supply chains and environmental conditions, necessitating a focus on system hardening and resilience. The discussion identified the following considerations:

• Although they are not always top of mind when considering new technologies, participants expressed interest in emerging solutions such as small modular nuclear reactors, wave and tidal energy, and other renewable generation technologies.
• When considering how to create a resilient system, identifying critical loads and necessary storage locations can be a useful approach to guiding investments.
• When it comes to energy planning, actions such as developing virtual power plants (VPPs) can help build momentum in energy resilience.
• Building relationships before a disaster is critical to addressing both physical and cyber threats. Organizing working groups or other recurring stakeholder meetings can help create and maintain these communication pathways.
• Taking a threat-agnostic approach to preparedness and consequence management can be beneficial, especially since many hazards impact multiple systems at once.
• Participants are planning for potential compounding events, such as the back-to-back typhoons and hurricanes in the Pacific or the potential for cyberattacks on the heels of a natural disaster.
• Participants are considering an increase in black-start emergency exercises to prepare for future events.

Strengthening Cybersecurity

Although all infrastructure faces cybersecurity threats, the proximity of U.S. territories, Alaska and Hawai'i to foreign nation-state threat actors is a concern as is the threat posed by cybercriminals. This discussion explored emerging cyber threats to energy infrastructure and strategies that territories and states are working to implement to protect against those threats:

• Building a community-wide cybersecurity culture can help advance good cyber hygiene practices (e.g., multifactor authentication and resetting factory-default passwords) at all levels. These practices are key to preventing many cyber threats.
• Artificial intelligence can be used as a tool to identify and address cybersecurity gaps. Additionally, although artificial intelligence may increase the speed of cyber-attacks and exploitation, it does not necessarily increase the sophistication of an attack, meaning that basic cybersecurity practices can still play a significant role in cyber defense.
• Forming territory-wide or regional cyber working groups, whether formal or informal, with regular briefings and training has played a role in expanding situational awareness and identifying threats.
• Federal offices, such as DOE CESER, the national labs, and CISA, can play a role in supporting territorial cybersecurity needs.

Bolstering the Workforce

Many islanded communities are actively working to expand the labor pool of qualified experts to install, operate, and maintain modern energy infrastructure. They are working through a number of initiatives to identify and foster on-island talent and to attract new talent to the islands to build a stronger workforce supply chain in the energy sector. The discussion of how territories and islanded communities are working in this space included:

• Training in fundamentals, rather than in only specific technologies, can help workers move seamlessly across fields as technology evolves.
• Some territories have found success through diaspora "return" initiatives, which are targeted efforts to connect islanders who are seeking to return home with employment opportunities.
• Training and recruitment models may include aspects such as:
• Regional training partnerships that combine education and hands-on training and have proven to support retention.
• High school outreach to build early interest in careers in the energy, utility, and emergency-response sectors.
• Apprenticeships and competitive scholarships for engineering and energy degrees in exchange for a service commitment in an islanded community.
• Community-based disaster response and resilience training, developed with local communities and public service commissions.

Investing in Energy Infrastructure

With the federal regulatory environment shifting as it relates to energy infrastructure, islanded communities have been working to identify alternative avenues for investing in energy and community resilience. This discussion explored programs and unique solutions that territories are leveraging:

• Potential financing and risk-mitigation tools could include tariffed on-bill financing, repaid through energy savings and tied to the meter rather than the customer's credit; Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs; and credit enhancements such as loan loss reserves.
• When establishing an infrastructure or clean-energy financing authority, it can be helpful to consider carefully the state's or territory's legal powers, risk-mitigation authority, and investment authority so that the entity has the right tools at its disposal to foster creativity in project delivery.
• Projects funded by green banks and state financing models included those focused on distributed energy financing, microgrid-enabled housing, solar PV recycling and manufacturing, and relatively low-cost capital used to buy down equity or debt.
• While some individual projects may be small, territories and remote communities can consider bundling multiple projects into larger procurement deals to attract capital.

Conclusion

Resilience is more than strengthening the grid; it extends to building the partnerships that keep communities operating in the face of disaster. The 2026 Energy Resilience Roundtable for U.S. territories, Alaska, and Hawaiʻi provided a forum for state and territorial leaders to discuss the most pressing challenges they are facing and identify promising solutions. At the third iteration of this event, state and territory teams were able to build upon their knowledge from previous events and work toward developing collaborative approaches to energy resilience, energy security and cost reduction. NGA looks forward to continuing this important work with the U.S. territories, Alaska, and Hawaiʻi.