Company: CNLHP
Filing Date: 2025-02-14
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000072741-25-000007
Chunk: 26

Company: CONNECTICUT LIGHT & POWER CO
Filing Date: 2025-02-14
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 26
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 impacts of climate change that are presented in the form of weather or natural events or due to longer-term shifts in climate patterns, as well as transitional impacts related to a shift to a lower-carbon economy and changes to address mitigation and adaptation requirements.  To address physical and transitional impacts related to climate change, maintain resiliency across our system, and enable potential opportunities for our business, we are pursuing the following actions:

•Improving our system resiliency in response to climate change through vegetation management, pole and wire strengthening, flood proofing, and other system hardening measures; 

•Conducting climate modeling to assess vulnerable regions and infrastructure in order to prioritize hazard mitigation projects;

•Implementing a grid modernization plan that will enhance our electric distribution infrastructure to improve resiliency and reliability and increase opportunities to facilitate integration of distributed energy resources, electric vehicle infrastructure, and electrification of building heat;

•Focusing on improving the efficiency of our electric and natural gas distribution systems, preparing for increased opportunities that clean energy advancements create, and providing customers with ways to optimize their energy efficiency; 

•Pursuing new technologies and incentives for decarbonization of energy in the sectors that both we and our customers operate in;

•Evaluating opportunities for our natural gas system and exploring alternative, less carbon-intensive technologies like networked geothermal for heating and cooling; and

•Investigating emerging technologies such as energy storage and automation programs that improve reliability.

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Physical risks from climate change may be acute due to increased severity of extreme weather events or chronic due to changes in precipitation patterns and extreme variability in weather patterns, rising mean temperatures and/or rising sea levels and shifting weather conditions, such as changes in precipitation, extreme heat, more frequent and severe storms, droughts, wildfires and floods.  These risks may result in customers’ energy and water usage increasing or decreasing depending on the duration and magnitude of the changes, degradation of water quality and our ability to reliably deliver our services to customers.  Severe weather may cause outages, potential disruption of operations and property damage to our assets.

Our actions to improve system reliability and resiliency allow our business to operate under changing conditions and meet customer expectations.  System improvements are designed to withstand severe weather impacts and include installing new and stronger infrastructure like poles, wires and related system equipment, as well as enhanced year-round tree trimming.  We are reinforcing existing critical facilities to withstand storm surges and future substations are being “flood hardened” to better protect our system against storm surges associated