Incentivizing Grid Reliability—Roundtable Discussion Takeaways and Path Forward

Electricity reliability remains an intractable problem in many countries, with over three billion people still lacking reasonably reliable service. On October 14, 2025, an in-person roundtable discussion in Washington D.C. unpacked the power reliability challenge in low- and middle-income countries and pressure-tested ideas from the newly released working paper Incentivizing Reliability: A Framework for Performance-Linked Electricity Improvements. The event convened operators, regulators, funders, and researchers to explore how locally tailored, performance-based incentives—paired with practical measurement and verification—can translate reliability from aspiration into accountability and quality service.