Inverter-based resources (IBRs) are accumulating faster than the planning engineers handing them off to operations can validate their behavior under disturbance. Every one of these pressures eventually collides with a rate case cycle, a capital recovery mechanism, and a regulatory posture architected for a steady-load, vertically-integrated world that no longer exists in most service territories.

The honest diagnosis is not that any one of these challenges is unsolvable. It is that the industry is being asked to solve all of them simultaneously without the data foundation that would let it see clearly what is happening or model honestly what is coming.