Investments in resilience, once considered discretionary, are now becoming central to underwriting strategy. That shift is being driven by climate volatility, and insurers need to adapt - quickly.
“Insurance has the benefit of writing very short-term insurance policies,” said Jason Kaminsky (pictured), CEO of kWh Analytics, “but we’re seeing all these events happen that affect different asset classes differently.”
In renewable energy, Kaminsky said short policy tenures have traditionally insulated insurers from the long-term impact of environmental risk. That buffer is disappearing. Increasing frequency and severity of events are forcing a more asset-specific, data-driven approach. “We started really as a data company,” he said. “We brought that into the renewable energy space and insurance underwriting.”
Today, underwriting isn’t just about assessing exposure - it's about understanding the infrastructure. “What is the actual equipment deployed? How are they deploying it? How are they using the racking that it’s on?” Kaminsky said. These technical details are no longer background noise. They're now central to pricing decisions.
AI is playing a bigger role in underwriting and risk selection, but Kaminsky warned that automation alone won’t solve the sector’s challenges. “AI is part of it,” he said, “but also, in our space, there’s a lot of data that’s just siloed.”
The problem isn’t the lack of data. It’s that useful, granular data often doesn’t reach the underwriter. “A lot of that exists, it just doesn’t always get in the hands of the underwriter,” he said. “You could have two solar projects next to each other, seeing the same wind, and one will have catastrophic failure and the other one won’t.”
To be useful, data needs to be both high-fidelity and actionable. “What is, I’ll call, the fidelity of the data?” Kaminsky said. “You can say this site had a loss, this one didn’t, but unless you know what the equipment is on that site, how they are operating it... it doesn’t necessarily help you underwrite to a resiliency decision.”
Technology is helping, but Kaminsky emphasized the human decision-making side. “Part of it is AI, part of it is just data flows and information sharing, and part of it is fundamental research to say, hey, this solar module is better, this roofing material is better,” he said.
More underwriting conversations are beginning to factor in resilience - not just hazard. But pricing those investments is still a work in progress. “Over the next three to five years we’ll have much better signals over what are those resiliency decisions,” Kaminsky said. “This is a more resilient home, this is a more resilient bridge, this is a more resilient solar project - we’re pushing the needle on that.”
In his view, the insurance industry is slowly learning to treat resiliency as a variable that can and should be priced. “What we’re seeing in our space is that you had significant losses, and then there was a lot of innovation to say, ‘hey, we can actually deploy technology differently’,” he said. “Now there’s whole new products available, or modifications of products available, that actually significantly improved the risk quality.”
As climate-related events shift from occasional to frequent, secondary perils are becoming primary threats. In response, Kaminsky said insurers need better tools - not just faster data. “The nature of the risk is changing, the nature of the resiliency decisions are changing,” he said.
For all the progress on the underwriting side, the market still needs a crucial link between innovation and client behavior: the broker. Kaminsky argued that brokers need to take a more active role in helping clients understand how investments in resiliency affect pricing and coverage.
“The thing we hear time and time and time again is, if I make this investment, how will that affect me as a buyer of insurance?” he said. “Brokers, are often that first line of defense... the conduit to be educational.”
Even those inside the industry don’t always know the incentives available. “I live in California,” Kaminsky said. “There is a whole bunch of things that the Department of Insurance says, if you do these things to your home, you save money on your insurance policy. I didn’t know about that. This is my industry.”
He believes brokers can take a more strategic, consultative role - using underwriting data to help clients make smarter risk decisions. “A price signal is not helpful unless someone is telling the client, this is what gets you a better price,” he said.
That kind of transparency and communication is critical, particularly when underwriting becomes more complex and investment-dependent. “The whole value chain needs to be bought into the same ideas, and some will do it better than others,” he said.
