ABOUT 

Utility systems are foundational to everyday life. They shape affordability, reliability, public health, environmental sustainability, economic development, community resilience, digital access, and quality of life.

As these systems face rapid change, including energy transition, climate adaptation, infrastructure modernization, technological innovation, cybersecurity risks, affordability pressures, and growing equity concerns, there is a growing need for sustained dialogue across research, policy, regulation, management, and practice.

Utility P&M responds to this need by creating a shared professional space for people working across disciplines, sectors, institutions, and infrastructure domains.

In addition, Utility P&M responds to an important opportunity for greater intellectual connection across utility-related research. Scholarship on essential utility systems is extensive, but different sectors have developed partly through distinct disciplinary traditions and around different substantive questions. Electricity research has particularly strong traditions in economics, regulation, market design, pricing, and reliability; broadband and telecommunications scholarship has extensively examined competition, regulation, investment, and access; and water research has developed substantial literatures on governance, institutions, utility management, pricing, and resource management. Wastewater scholarship remains strongly shaped by engineering, treatment, environmental performance, and resource-recovery questions, while hydrogen research has concentrated heavily on technological, engineering, and techno-economic challenges, alongside a growing policy and regulatory literature. Natural gas scholarship spans energy economics, markets and pipeline regulation, environmental questions, and increasingly the role of gas in the energy transition.

These differences represent an opportunity as much as a fragmentation. Many of these systems share important institutional characteristics: they provide essential services through capital-intensive network infrastructures subject to substantial public governance and regulation. Yet the concepts, theories, and findings developed within one utility sector do not always travel readily into others. A shared intellectual space can bring these traditions into closer conversation—supporting comparison across utility systems, identifying both commonalities and important differences, and creating opportunities for theories and insights developed in one sector to inform research in another. Utility P&M helps create that space.

Utility P&M supports professional connection, knowledge exchange, and field-building through research discussions, policy dialogue, practitioner engagement, webinars, conference activities, mentoring, resource sharing, newsletters, member spotlights, job and opportunity postings, and collaborative programming.

The community is designed to help connect people who may work on similar utility and infrastructure challenges but are often located in different professional associations, academic fields, policy areas, regulatory settings, public agencies, utilities, nonprofit organizations, and community contexts.

Utility P&M welcomes individuals and institutions working across: