Emergent Archetypes
Christine Primmer, a Senior Advisor with Clarum Advisors, is an investor/operator with diverse expertise helping venture-backed technology organizations build scale and resilience. She has closely advised, operated, and partnered with twenty-plus venture-backed tech companies in energy, transportation, smart buildings, and IOT, ranging from Series A to E, helping them grow revenue and scale operations using data driven strategies, partnerships/M&A, and capital.
As a Director with Clarum Advisors, Molly Podolefsky leverages her experience in economics, decarbonization, corporate sustainability, corporate finance, and the power and utilities sector to help innovative, clean tech companies.
In Part One, we traced how the utility model — founded to deliver safe, reliable, and affordable power under public oversight — is being challenged by the pace and scale of demand created by AI data centers. We also looked at other recent examples where business-model innovation solved demand-supply imbalances.
We are seeing another business model evolution happen in real time now. AI-driven load growth is increasing faster than traditional planning and regulatory cycles can accommodate. Moreover, this load growth looks different: AI load density is reshaping how, where, and by whom power is planned for, financed, and delivered.
Utilities remain the anchors of safety and reliability, but the ecosystem forming around them looks increasingly different — an echo of parallel inflection points such as the rise of TowerCos (such as American Tower) and independent power producers (IPPs) explored in Part One of this series. When incumbents reach structural limits, new archetypes emerge to bridge the gap.
It’s already happening. The question is: Will these archetypes complement utilities, or compete with them? So far, the evidence is mixed.