For years, backup power lived mostly in the facilities budget. Generators, batteries, uninterruptible power supplies and redundant utility feeds were evaluated as operating infrastructure, with finance brought in only when someone needed approval for the capital. That separation is becoming harder to maintain, and the shift is showing up first in how credit analysts are looking at data centers.
S&P Global Market Intelligence said in July that power availability, grid interconnection timelines and backup power requirements are increasingly becoming credit-relevant variables as AI-driven data centers grow larger and more capital intensive. The analysis grouped resilience risk alongside execution, cost and concentration risk, arguing that these projects increasingly resemble industrial infrastructure development rather than conventional technology investment, and that default risk is becoming more correlated across operators exposed to the same underlying power constraints. The implications extend well beyond data centers. For companies whose revenue depends on continuously operating factories, warehouses, cold-storage facilities, laboratories, hospitals or highly automated production lines, the ability to withstand a power interruption increasingly touches the same things credit analysts already care about: cash flow stability, operating margins, liquidity and the probability that an unexpected event interferes with debt service.
The Cost of Losing Power Is Now Easier to Quantify
The shift is happening as better data makes outage exposure harder to treat as an abstract operational risk. Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported in March that major power outages cost U.S. residential and business customers an average of more than $67 billion annually between 2018 and 2024, an analysis designed to put a specific economic value on outages at the state and customer level rather than treat reliability primarily as a utility performance metric.
The reliability numbers reinforce the concern. U.S. electricity customers experienced an average of roughly 11 hours without power in 2024, nearly twice the annual average during the preceding decade, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Major events, including Hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, accounted for about 80% of those interruption hours. For a household, those figures describe inconvenience and economic loss. For a business with a high-value continuous process, they describe potential lost production, spoiled inventory, missed customer commitments and revenue that may never be recovered. A facility does not need to experience an 11-hour outage for power reliability to become financially material; what matters is the relationship between how long an interruption lasts and the point at which a company's operations begin generating losses.
Credit Analysis Is Moving Closer to the Electrical Room
There are already signs of that convergence. S&P Global's project-finance and digital-infrastructure scorecards now weigh buildability, downside resilience and structural protections when rating individual data center transactions, treating downtime-related lease terms as part of the same analysis used to assess construction and completion risk, alongside the execution and financing risk already showing up in how bond investors price data center debt. The logic extends beyond digital infrastructure: if an interruption can stop production, delay fulfillment, trigger contractual penalties or force a company to buy emergency capacity at a premium, resilience has a path to the income statement, and finance should be able to quantify that path.
The risk sits at the grid level too. NERC's 2026 State of Reliability report, published in June, documented a 1,800 MW customer-initiated load loss in the Eastern Interconnection in February 2025, caused by data center UPS systems tripping offline during a transmission fault that would normally have cleared without incident. It was one of several such events NERC has now tracked since 2022 as large loads compete for scarce interconnection capacity across an increasingly strained grid. Backup systems therefore sit on both sides of the resilience equation. They can protect an individual operation while also changing how a large facility interacts with the grid during a disturbance, a dynamic utilities and developers are already racing to manage as AI-driven demand accelerates.
The Question Is Not Whether a Company Owns a Generator
This does not mean every company needs more backup generation. It means the resilience discussion needs to become more sophisticated. A lender evaluating operational exposure should care about how long critical loads can operate independently, which operations receive priority, whether backup systems have been tested under realistic conditions, how fuel or stored energy would be replenished during an extended event, and whether the facility has a single electrical point of failure. Those answers are materially different from simply confirming that a building has emergency generators.
Finance Needs a Resilience Number
For CFOs, the practical change is relatively simple, even if the coordination it requires is not. Facilities teams already know which equipment cannot lose power. Operations knows what an hour of downtime does to production. Procurement knows what replacement equipment and emergency fuel cost. Risk teams know what insurance will and will not cover. The missing step is usually combining those answers into a single view.
A resilience investment can then be evaluated against a defined financial exposure: the expected cost of downtime, the amount of revenue dependent on uninterrupted operations, the contractual consequences of failure and the length of time the business can operate without utility service. That changes the conversation around generators, storage, microgrids and redundant feeds. Instead of asking whether backup power produces an attractive standalone return, finance can ask what financial exposure the investment removes. Credit markets are already beginning to make that connection in power-intensive infrastructure, and companies do not have to wait for a rating agency or a lender to ask the question before they work out the answer themselves.
