Grid on the Brink: What US CEOs Said About Climate Risk in Q3

Three months ago, corporate America was still counting the cost of a deep freeze. This most recent quarter, it was coming to terms with sweltering temperatures and an energy system pushed to its limits by both human and natural forces.

In the last edition of Climate Risk Signals, Winter Storm Fern surfaced again and again in companies’ investor communications, with 23 firms naming the storm on their April-to-June earnings calls. By the July-to-September season, just three did. In its place, executives groused about an early-July heatwave — and a rolling barrage of violent thunderstorms — that drove the PJM grid to a new all-time peak and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest.

Extreme heat was the leading climate risk last earnings season. The number of companies referencing heat challenges jumped from five in the second quarter to 22 in the third. While wildfire talk held steady in volume, the context changed. Executives spent the spring recounting the long tail of impacts from last year’s Los Angeles fires, while in summer they were describing live conflagrations from Spokane to southern Georgia.

Insurers, meanwhile, continued the 2026 trend of reporting lower catastrophe losses than the year before, and explaining how this enables them to lower property rates — so long as a late-season hurricane doesn’t emerge.

This latest edition of Climate Proof’s quarterly Climate Risk Signals analysis unpacks what executives at the biggest US public companies had to tell investors about climate risk and adaptation. Our findings show that from July to September, 157¹ of the 1,000 largest US public companies referenced climate impacts or adaptation actions across 11 sectors, down from 219 in the prior quarter. Many of these conversations concerned stresses on the power grid, the spread of wildfire risk, and the oddly quiescent insurance market.

📊 Explore all the excerpts over at the Climate Risk Signals Explorer HERE (paying members only)