The Grid Is No Longer Background
Michelle Fay is a partner in the Communities, Energy & Infrastructure segment and leads the firm’s global Energy Providers practice, supporting clients as they implement transformational programs. She brings more than twenty-five years of experience. Michelle’s expertise includes program and project management, organizational change management, account management, process and performance improvement, grid modernization, energy efficiency, and analytics.
Meredith Bodkin is a partner at Guidehouse, specializing in business transformation. With more than seventeen years of experience, she leads large-scale transformation projects for public sector and commercial clients, enhancing performance and operational efficiency. Meredith is known for strategic insights and ability to navigate complex challenges in organizational and operational transformation, workforce planning, procurement, program management, and change management.
Hector Artze is a partner in Guidehouse’s Communities, Energy & Infrastructure segment. His professional career spans more than thirty years in the utility and energy sectors. He assists energy, utility, and public sector clients in planning for their energy transformation; building infrastructure resiliency to mitigate impact of natural disasters; modernizing utility systems; reducing cost of operations and maintenance through process automation, optimization, and technology; and managing asset investments.
The U.S. power grid — and the utilities that operate it — are facing a paradigm shift unlike anything seen in the last century. The driver isn’t policy — it’s compute. AI is accelerating demand for large load data centers at a pace that’s outstripping traditional utility planning cycles.
This isn’t a future problem. Burgeoning demand for AI data centers is already reshaping load profiles in Virginia, Texas, and other hot spots. Guidehouse Research predicts that Virginia’s data center load will approach half of the state’s overall power consumption by 2030 — up from about a quarter today.
See Figure 1.
This shift is happening faster than most utilities are structurally prepared to handle. In Guidehouse’s tenth annual State and Future of the Power Industry pulse survey, more than sixty percent of utility leaders said they are ready for some load growth, but that system reliability needs are likely to temper upside.
Accelerated energy demand is coming, particularly over the next five years, but if utilities don’t lead through the data center surge, others will. The grid is no longer background infrastructure; it’s a strategic platform for the AI economy and one on which substantial new utility revenue can be built — if the right preparation and capital planning processes are implemented today.