A Business Developer’s Guide to Integrated Resource Plans

FirmoGraphs recently shared a blog about Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) with Energy Central readers. We're reposting it in its entirety.

You are a business developer in the ever-evolving energy sector, brimming with opportunities. But in this dynamically changing market, there is a constant risk of missing the best pursuits and becoming distracted by dead ends.

Fortunately, publicly available documents, integrated resource plans (IRPs), contain a wealth of information on planned energy projects. FirmoGraphs provides a compass to navigate the complex energy market landscape using IRPs and associated Public Utilities Commission (PUC) filings.

Integrated Resource Plans and How to Find Them

Integrated Resource Plans are the documents that large utilities use to outline their plans for meeting their future energy needs in an affordable, reliable, and sustainable manner. It consists of assessing the future electricity demand and a plan to meet those future electric needs. It is called “integrated” because it includes demand and supply resources.

In most jurisdictions, utilities must submit their IRPs to the Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs) for approval because of the important topic and effect on the particular state.

Finding IRPs requires visiting the websites of the utilities you're interested in or searching the websites of state PUCs. While this may seem small, the sheer number of IRPs available can be overwhelming. And that’s where FirmoGraphs can help. We maintain a substantial database of IRPs, updated with the latest releases, ensuring you have access to the most relevant information.

Understanding Integrated Resource Plans

Simply acquiring IRPs isn't enough; you need to be able to interpret and extract valuable insights from them. And to do that, you have to understand what they are.

Integrated plans present evidence of justification for multibillion-dollar investments. Many utilities are making huge investments, and in this way, using the IRPs, they show that their investments will benefit ratepayers and future-proof the utility in critical areas, such as in meeting grid reliability and environmental goals.

IRPs provide transparency to consumers and make planning more open to relevant governmental agencies, consumers, and other interested parties.

IRPs present partnership opportunities for interested parties and provide a chance for them inside and outside their planning region to review planning decisions and secure business opportunities for themselves. This is an excellent way for business developers to review potential future projects and identify the ones they might be interested in and involved in.

The time spans that IRPs cover vary, but they’re typically from 5 to 20 years (or more). IRPs usually contain their issuers’ preferred resource portfolios for the entire period they cover, as well as alternative scenarios and sensitivity analyses.

How frequently a utility issues IRP usually depends on the state and its rules. Utilities publish IRPs every year, two, three, or more. Also of note is that some states have IRP rules related to the filing requirements (such as California, Florida, Michigan, etc).

The size of IRPs also varies, with the small ones only containing 50 pages and the large ones containing hundreds of pages. The most recent IRP of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has 546 pages.

In all, we at FirmoGraphs have collected hundreds of pages of IRPs since we started working with the documents.

Analyzing Integrated Resource Plans

The size of the IRPs can make them time-consuming to analyze, which is one reason you should consider letting FirmoGraphs analyze them for you. If, however, you’re determined to press on by yourself, you should start, unsurprisingly, at the beginning, as most IRPs contain high-level summaries of their issuers’ planning objectives and strategies.

For example, the 20th page of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s “2023 Integrated Resource Plan” is a bullet point summary with the headline, “Roadmap.” It is preceded by six pages of introduction and energy and grid portfolio information.

Meanwhile, the Hawaiian Electric Company’s 2023 Integrated Grid Plan executive summary starts with a 2-page overview that precedes summaries of the utility’s resource and action plans.

The resource planning process usually starts with goals and objectives for the specific planning horizon. Our database is structured to contain all the details related to the different goals and their types, including years when the goals will be achieved. If some utility published their goal to increase renewable capacity by 50 GW in the next three years, you would find that in our data.

Another essential part of the IRP is related to the plans, and our data contains a detailed presentation of the plans with partially extracted data. Here, you can find all the information about the capacity addition plans, expansions, upgrades, and improvements. 

Because of the coal-fired generation rules and requirements, one of the main topics in every IRP is the power plant retirements. For example, Georgia Power filed its 2022 IRP, which calls for the retirement of 12 generating coal units by 2028, in line with new guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Our team correctly maintains and updates all the announced retirement years by site and unit.

Since a lot can change in a year, looking at the changes in plans in an organization’s IRPs can be very informative. They show whether the organization is increasing, maintaining, or reducing its reliance on certain resources and technologies and, hence, the number of projects it plans to do.

Our database focuses on the IRPs for the Top 500 Utilities by revenue. We update our data regularly, with the latest available reports every time a new report is published. Our team has collected over 300 reports since we started working with the IRPs, and our database is still growing.

How FirmoGraphs Can Help

As you can see, getting IRPs and processing them is time-consuming work. Since there is no unique form or template for them, the tough part is converting the information they contain to data and sorting it in ways that help you find projects your company pursues. Our data is uniform and easily accessed in easy-to-use dashboards.  

FirmoGraphs is putting our database to work for you, and we keep it up to date on Integrated Resource Plans. We know how to work with the IRPs to help you extract valuable information.

We’d be glad to meet with you and help your company sort through the wealth of information in IRPs. Feel free to request a meeting and review the data live on our Business Intelligence platform.