Rhizome Partners with Unitil to Prioritize Resilience Investments in New Hampshire and Massachusetts

Unitil will leverage Rhizome’s AI-powered gridADAPT and gridFIRM planning tools to expand grid resilience

SAN FRANCISCO and HAMPTON, N.H., Oct. 21, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rhizome, the AI-powered grid planning platform that integrates climate and wildfire risk into long-term capital planning and asset maintenance strategies, today announced a three-year partnership agreement with Unitil Corporation to prioritize resilience investments through machine learning-based risk modeling and cost-benefit analysis across Unitil’s electrical service areas in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Under the agreement, Unitil will deploy Rhizome’s gridADAPT and gridFIRM planning tools on a single software instance to model and plan against emerging multi-hazard, climate-driven risks, including wildfire and extreme winter weather in New England. With resilience spending increasingly scrutinized at the state level, the partnership is aimed at helping Unitil make defensible, cost-justified investment decisions at a time when wildfire and intensifying weather are compounding affordability pressures utilities already face from aging infrastructure, load growth, and supply chain constraints.

Unitil, established in 1984, serves 97 communities in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, providing electric and natural gas services to over 215,000 customers. New England, not historically known for its wildfire risk, has seen those threats climb over the last five years. New Hampshire alone has recorded more than 504 wildfires since 2021 and broke a 130-year record for the driest summer in 2025. That rising wildfire exposure, combined with the 50+ inches of annual snow and ice across much of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, leaves utilities managing two substantial and growing risk factors at once.

“New England has become a region where utilities are thinking holistically about the system risks they face today and tomorrow,” said Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mishal Thadani. “Today’s partnership announcement with Unitil is the first step in first taking a uniform approach to risk quantification across all hazards, then improving resilience and investment planning to keep their customers’ lights on and bills low.”

For Unitil, the work directly supports two state and board-level priorities: applying cost-benefit analysis to resilience capital spending, a growing requirement for capex approval, and giving its sustainability and corporate teams reliable access to climate risk metrics for regulatory and corporate reporting. By grounding investment decisions in defensible, evidence-backed analysis, Rhizome's platform helps Unitil direct limited capital where it reduces the most risk per dollar — a discipline that matters most when every resilience dollar is recovered from ratepayers.

Rhizome, launched in 2023, helps utilities model the impact of increasingly severe extreme weather against their systems. Combining AI, climate models, and historical utility asset data, the platform identifies and prioritizes resilience investments and upgrades. Its flagship gridADAPT tool combines climate hazard projections with operational performance data, enabling utilities to build forward-looking, evidence-backed resilience plans; gridFIRM extends that capability to long-term wildfire risk.

“We are excited to partner with Rhizome to better understand the climate risks facing our systems and prioritize investments that strengthen resilience,” said Sara Sankowich, Unitil’s Vice President Shared Services and Sustainability. “This work will help us make informed, cost-effective decisions that benefit our customers for years to come.”

Today’s announcement follows a December 2025 partnership agreement with National Grid covering wildfire resilience and assessment planning in Massachusetts, New York, and the UK in December of 2025. gridADAPT was also recently deployed with Horizon Energy Network in New Zealand in March 2026. Alongside Unitil, current Rhizome utility customers in New England also include Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO), and Vermont Electric Cooperative (VEC).

About Rhizome
Rhizome is the AI-powered grid planning platform that integrates climate and wildfire risk into long-term capital planning and asset maintenance strategies. It uses a utility's own operational data alongside climate, wildfire, and vegetation datasets to model the probability and consequence of asset failure under future climate conditions, then turns that risk profile into cost-benefit cases structured for capital planning and regulatory filings. Products include gridADAPT for multi-hazard reliability and resilience planning and gridFIRM for long-term wildfire risk planning. Rhizome's customers include National Grid, Avangrid, Fortis, Green Mountain Power, Horizon Energy, Unitil, and Vermont Electric Cooperative across North America, Europe, and Oceania. Founded in 2023, Rhizome is headquartered in San Francisco.

About Unitil
Unitil Corporation provides energy for life by safely and reliably delivering electricity and natural gas in New England. We are committed to the communities we serve and to developing people, business practices, and technologies that lead to the delivery of dependable, more efficient energy. Unitil Corporation is a public utility holding company with operations in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Together, Unitil’s operating utilities serve approximately 110,100 electric customers and 105,000 natural gas customers.

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