Emerson
Bob Yeager is President of Power and Water Solutions at Emerson.
Thought leaders in the energy and utilities industry are forecasting that 2026 will be a critical year dominated by pressure due to massive load growth from data centers, artificial intelligence, and onshoring of manufacturing. Surging power demand from data centers and electrification efforts are expected to test the limits of existing generation and grid infrastructure.
Maintaining reliability will be a top concern and this explosion in demand is also causing affordability challenges. But AI that is helping cause these issues is also being looked at as part of the solution.
Public Utilities Fortnightly Executive Editor Steve Mitnick turned to four experts facing the challenges and opportunities ahead in 2026. Guidehouse Global Energy Providers Practice Leader Michelle Fay, Emerson President of Power and Water Solutions Bob Yeager, and Energy Impact Partners Head of Innovation Evan Pittman with EIP Elevate Future Fund Managing Partner Anthony Oni provided their thoughts on what the new year will bring.
PUF’s Steve Mitnick: What’s your view of what the energy and utilities industry can expect to see and be challenged by in the new year 2026?
Bob Yeager: One of the biggest issues is data centers. We’re seeing an absolute proliferation of them globally, with a heavy concentration in the United States. These data centers are massive, using a lot of power from five hundred to several gigawatts. We have active projects underway as we speak.
There are two ways data centers can be powered. First is grid-connected. Our customers in the United States are building many new grid-connected combined cycle plants.
We have been awarded contracts for a large number of those greenfield, new-build projects in just the past eighteen to twenty-four months, which is a huge surge that we hadn’t seen before. I see that continuing in ’26, ’27, ’28. That’s the grid-connected side.
On the non-grid-connected side, it is difficult to get the megawatts on the ground fast enough due to several issues, including grid interconnects. Several of the hyperscalers are moving ahead, building these data centers with their own power blocks. We’re working on these projects where a typical configuration can be a large number of gas turbines – twenty or thirty – and twenty or thirty containers of batteries.
The swings in power block cycling can be very challenging. Because AI model training runs in parallel, these power blocks can swing between five hundred megawatts to a gigawatt, up to four times a minute.
To put this in perspective, a typical nuclear unit is a thousand megawatts. Imagine cycling a pressurized water reactor four times a minute. Fortunately for our customers, we’ve been doing energy management systems for a long time to make all that work in a balanced, efficient manner.
Our system coordinates the twenty or thirty gas turbines or batteries to make sure they run safely, efficiently, and reliably, helping to avoid mechanical damage due to the cycling. We automate battery state of charge with a battery management system that can respond within milliseconds to large load swings.
I think these kinds of projects that support the massive demand we’re seeing now will continue for the next two to three years.
PUF: What role do you expect Emerson to play with these challenges to control systems to deal with that ramping and cycling?
Bob Yeager: The good news is that we’ve done very high-speed automation for years. Our whole system is time-synchronized to the millisecond. It’s designed to respond to those kinds of load swings and maintain a constant state of charge on the batteries and safe operations for the gas turbines.
We can also optimize load path if it’s a combined cycle and do high-speed load shedding. Those had been separate projects for many years, but now, they’re being implemented together on one site.
It’s all about reacting at high speeds and maintaining constant load reliably. Our automation platform can help attain 99.999 percent reliability. We control and monitor hundreds of combined cycle plants around the world and automate 1.8 million megawatts of power generated by various assets globally.
PUF: Including a lot in Asia and other countries.
Bob Yeager: Asia, Europe, Middle East, Latin America. The scenario I just described for the U.S., we’re also seeing in other areas like China. We have over a thousand Ovation automation systems in China.
China has the same surge in data center construction. Data centers are being built all around the world. But the leading data centers are in China and the U.S.
PUF: Talk about Ovation and control management systems for power plants.
Bob Yeager: Ovation is our integrated automation platform and, humbly, we have a number one global market position. The system hardware and software are specifically designed for the power industry. The controllers are fully fault-tolerant and redundant, failing over within microseconds across the back plane.
The system’s high-speed control level is time-synchronized to the millisecond. That’s important because in a power plant, if there ever is an issue such as a unit trip, the root cause must be known immediately. One of the best ways to identify the root cause is through the high-speed sequence of events report that documents events to the millisecond.
But more importantly, our system control strategies are built using SAMA diagrams, which are drawings that use PIDs, analog and digital logic to create the source code for the system.
The SAMA diagrams, which could be thousands of sheets for a combined cycle plant, are automatically downloaded to the controller; there are no black boxes. Operators can watch the logic execute in the plant. If there ever is an issue in the plant, it’s easy to use the control system to debug and troubleshoot the cause.
I like to joke that if a thousand-megawatt coal unit or eight-hundred-megawatt combined cycle unit trips at full load, the plant manager can’t be told that we’re not sure what happened, so let’s start it up and see if it happens again.
That’s not going to work. Our control system provides clear operational visibility to troubleshoot power plant issues. That differentiates us; the combination of visibility with high-speed control applications that are required for data centers. It’s a perfect match.
PUF: With unprecedented growth, do you have the manpower and supplies to deal with all this internationally and in the U.S.?
Bob Yeager: We do. We have facilities all around the world where we’re able locally to manufacture and assemble down to the board level. For example, we’re completely localized in China with a whole team in country. We have similar facilities and manufacturing capabilities around the world.
Additionally, we don’t have the electronic component crisis that everyone had in 2022, that seems to have eased. So, we don’t have to deal with supply chain issues to that level anymore.
We are hiring aggressively all around the world, working with many local colleges and technical schools. For example, we have had good success with co-ops, bringing in students to learn about our business and industry while they complete their studies.
We’re also hiring experienced people. When we head into the outage seasons in the fall and spring, we will have a surge in demand for labor and we’re hiring now to keep up.
PUF: Talk about outages as Emerson has worked with the generators and utilities on those.
Bob Yeager: We work with our global customers during their planned outages. These outages could be just a few days if it’s a minor upgrade, all the way to a repowering project where maybe they’re rebuilding the turbine or doing maintenance on the boiler, which could take weeks.
We support hundreds of outages every fall and spring all around the world. We work closely with our customers and partners and our many experienced people in the field to implement projects during these outages.
Many times during these outages, they implement new automated controls or upgrade existing ones with new features. Our Ovation 4.0 version was released in May 2025. It’s the first-ever GenAI-enabled automation system specifically designed for the power and water industries that we know of in the market.
In fact, we are installing our GenAI-enabled system in fifty power plants this fall, which will be very busy for us. After the outage, all those plants will have the new Ovation 4.0 release and GenAI capabilities to optimize the integrated startup procedures, for example, or lube oil or whatever the application is.
Our GenAI-based Ovation Virtual advisor interacts with the operator to answer questions, telling them anything they want to know about their systems or the process. That product recently went live.
PUF: Talk about the AI tools within your software that make a big difference in availability, reliability, productivity.
Bob Yeager: We’re creating the smartest person ever to walk into a power plant. Imagine having a person who knows everything about everything over your shoulder, helping in every decision made.
Our GenAI-enabled system works with a local large language model. We don’t put this information in the cloud.
This local large language model runs as part of the Ovation 4.0 system. It’s on a server connected directly to the highway. The beauty of it is that the customer can train that model by adding all the turbine and boiler documentation, the heat recovery steam generator documentation, valves, transmitters, thousands of sheets of logic data, et cetera.
It helps operators by automatically looking at thousands of sheets of logic and responding in seconds to a prompt or question. Also, since it is local with customer-trained models that do not go to the cloud, their intellectual property is protected. We don’t see it. The plant down the street doesn’t see it.
Our built-in software agents look for anomalies as the plant is running and notifies operators if an event is detected. We’re able to see, for example, that if an operator’s going through an integrated startup and a feed water block valve is closed and it shouldn’t be, then the agent will say, “I sense you’re in startup, and there could be a level issue because the feed water block valve is closed. Go look at that and maybe open it.”
The operator can say, “Oh, you’re right. The feed water block valve is closed. Let me open it up and save the unit.” Those scenarios and avoiding plant trips or forced outages are what is possible with this new GenAI-enabled system.
PUF: What role do you hope to play to drive the sector and your firm to the best outcomes?
Bob Yeager: I’ve been in this industry a long time and with my team we have cultivated close relationships. I don’t view us as a vendor and customers; we work closely as partners and friends.
Proof of that relationship is in our user group community. We have hundreds of members all around the world that attend our conferences. Many even bring their families to enjoy the week with others they have met through the years.
I view us as stewards of the global power industry, especially the U.S. industry. Our role as a steward of the industry is to evaluate new technology, like GenAI, and strategically determine how it can make power plants run better, more reliably, and more efficiently.
Many of our customers, who are into technology as well, don’t have a dedicated team continuously looking at new technology to determine if it has a role in the control room.
PUF: With all these plants in different environments using varied technologies, it must give you some insights.
Bob Yeager: It allows us to have great visibility. I like to feel we have our finger on the pulse all around the world because we see everything, including all the outages and the issues that our customers are struggling with.
We see the various strategies they’re working on to meet load demands and how they’re shifting from fossil fuel to renewables to meet sustainability goals.
That gives us great visibility, but also great responsibility. We need to make sure that we do everything we can so that power around the world is the most reliable, effective, and efficient as it possibly can be. That’s what we do.
What's Ahead in 2026 articles at fortnightly.com
