FirstEnergy seeks looser reliability rules as outages grow more common

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.