Strategy & Planning

“Utilities are pushing more obligations and responsibilities onto hyperscalers to avoid putting a burden on other customers. For example, we have seen a tech firm develop a transmission line it owns in the northwest U.S.”

“The most surprising is how many times we heard how much the utilities require regulatory stability to meet their goals. They are looking for predictability. However, it’s essential they make resilience a permanent capability to prepare and turn disruption into opportunity.”

“We’re seeing annual growth rates of between 13-16% nationally from data center power year-over-year between now and the year 2030. Data centers constituted about 5% of total U.S. demand in 2024, for comparison. That’ll increase to between 16-23% percent by 2033.”

“We’re fortunate being a global company on the supply chain side. Being part of the Iberdrola family in AVANGRID, it speeds up our wait time to 2 to 3 years. Where we had impacts from COVID in the U.S. on distribution transformers, we were able to take manufacturing slots from Brazil.”

“If we build an energy system which nobody can afford, we’ll have failed. If we build an energy system which is clean but not reliable, we’ll have failed. If we continue using unabated fossil fuels, we’ll have failed. The answer is somewhere in the middle of these three, and we’ve got to have a properly informed debate.”

“I see my leadership at Exelon and my leadership at EEI as perfect matches in terms of what we’re doing. Because if I lead with my customer, I lead with reliability, resiliency, security, and affordability. Those issues permeate all our organizations.”

Key industry thought leaders from the C-suite gave unique perspectives on building an energy system for resilience, growth, affordability, and more at the sidelines of Accenture’s International Utilities and Energy Conference 2025.

“The key takeaway is understanding the evolving approach to traditional refurbishment projects. That’s where advanced conductors like ACCC come in. These all-aluminum composite conductors offer higher capacity and performance without requiring changes to the existing line design.”

“The biggest takeaway is the importance of building a stronger bridge between the engineers in the office and the crews out in the field. It’s about understanding what’s happening on site — what tools are being used, what challenges they’re facing — and making sure that insight makes its way back into our design process.”

James Duehning, Mark Van Dyne, Kent Herzog, Alex Lee, and Andrew Schulte: “We need to shift from a deterministic planning model to something more probabilistic, especially with all the uncertainty around future load and generation. The way we identify project needs today doesn’t fully reflect the realities we’re facing.”