31 3.3 OPERATIONAL AND COMMERCIAL PREPAREDNESS Perhaps most importantly, participants agreed that preparing for disruptions that cannot be avoided by strengthening the ability to adapt, respond and recover quickly. Commercial and operational mechanisms can help manage constrained supply and serve priority demand. These include dynamic curtailment, critical- load allocation, preventative monitoring and supportive payment mechanisms. Participants placed particular emphasis on organizational readiness and speed of decision-making. Traditional hierarchical operating models can slow response during fast-moving disruptions. Frontline teams need clearer decision rights and the authority to act when conditions change. This can include shutting down operations or redirecting resources without waiting for multiple layers of approval. Preparedness also needs to extend beyond the initial response. Companies should know in advance how critical operations will be restored. This means understanding repair requirements, access to spare parts, recovery timelines and the people needed to bring assets back online. Stress testing and crisis exercises can expose these gaps before a real disruption. Ukraine provides a clear example of the importance of recovery capability under sustained disruption. According to the IEA, Ukraine lost around 9 GW of generation capacity in the March 2024 as a result of attacks, but around 3 GW was restored ahead of the following winter. Ukraine continues to strengthen this resilience through greater decentralization, distributed generation and improved emergency preparedness. Commercial and market structures can keep flexible capacity available before it is needed. Capacity and availability payments can compensate for assets to remain on standby, allowing existing infrastructure to respond when the system comes under stress. China provides one example per the case study below. UNATTRIBUTED QUOTE UNATTRIBUTED QUOTE “IN A CRISIS, DECISION-MAKING HAS TO MOVE TO THE FRONTLINE.” “PREPAREDNESS IS KNOWING HOW YOU WILL RECOVER BEFORE THE DISRUPTION HAPPENS” UNATTRIBUTED QUOTE “THE TOOLS TO FINANCE RESILIENCE ALREADY EXIST.” CASE STUDY / FLEXIBLE CAPACITY PAYMENTS Following multiple power and fuel supply crises, over 400GW of coal capacity has been retrofitted to operate at lower loads (20-30% of capacity). Commercially, this was supported by capacity payments that compensate plants for remaining available when needed. China’s coal-unit flexibility retrofits and capacity remuneration provide a working example of paying for availability, rather than energy output alone. The relevant lesson is the financing principle: a standby or flexible resource can be valuable even when rarely dispatched.