Resilient, Timely, and Affordable
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.
Alexina Jackson is a creative problem solver who thrives in collaboration, tackling big questions and setting transformational vision. As the founder of Seven Green Strategy and Senior Advisor at Clarum Advisors, Alexina leverages her experience in consulting, law, and technological and commercial innovation.
As 2026 starts, electric utilities on both sides of the Atlantic continue to find themselves in a period of volatile geopolitical change and rapid power system evolution. U.S. utilities continue to face rapid demand growth driven by AI and increasing end-use electrification amidst challenging operating conditions due to aging infrastructure, increasingly severe and destructive environmental events, and increasing renewable energy penetration, against a market background of worsening grid congestion, affordability issues, and evolving federal priorities and funding requirements.
In the UK, utilities also grapple with aging infrastructure, rapidly rising energy costs and affordability concerns, and frequent regulatory and policy shifts, while seeking to attract investment to build a digital economy for the future, and at the same time pushing ahead with decarbonization on pace to meet the country’s aggressive 2050 net-zero emissions target.
Utilities in both markets need 2026 strategies that are resilient to these internal and external system pressures to make grid investments with confidence under uncertainty.
This article describes a path to building healthy, modernized, and intelligent grid systems that can flexibly respond to changing pressures within this dynamic environment through no-regret investments that are robust across multiple, possible future scenarios.
The framework we suggest is step-wise and sequential — avoiding large leaps and focusing on incremental improvements driving immediate gains, to hedge against uncertainty while building a future-facing grid. Utilities can leverage the framework consistent with where each is on their unique modernization journey, starting at the right step at the right time:
Molly Podolefsky: Building grid intelligence takes meaningful capital investment, data generation, readiness, people resources, and knowledge. This tension means that intelligence brings value but requires value investment to create.
Develop Situational Awareness — visualize and understand specific system risks in order to prioritize reliability and resilience investments for impact and value;
Maximize the Contribution of Existing Assets — leverage grid awareness and intelligence to extract maximum value from grid assets already on the system; and
Procure Highest-Value Marginal Improvements — continually assess and build the business case for the next-best grid investment.
Synthesizing the Pressures Facing Power Providers
Applying an organizational framework to the pressures facing utilities in the U.S. and UK clarifies the problem statements that can be addressed through intelligent grid investments. Here are three areas to consider.
Alexina Jackson: Through strategic adoption and deployment of grid monitoring and intelligence solutions, utilities in the U.S. and UK can take incremental steps toward fully integrated, optimized grids and enhance energy security and affordability.
Reliability and Resilience — Utilities must ensure a resilient and reliable grid despite shifting demands on service and surrounding context:
Utilities in the U.S. face accelerated concentration of power demand while the lagging deployed generation resource mix is increasingly variable in production, driven by the push for decarbonization and electrification, and rapid decreases in the levelized cost of solar and battery energy storage systems (BESS).
At the same time, the infrastructure needed to carry power from source to sink is aging, under-sized, and often challenging to site, procure, deploy, and pay for. All while increasingly volatile weather patterns drive more frequent and severe wildfires, storms, and weather-related disasters, underscoring the pressure on utilities to undertake immediate improvements in reliability and resilience.
Increasing renewable energy penetration in the UK is driven by the country’s target for net-zero emissions by 2050. As in the U.S., aging and under-sized grid infrastructure makes it increasingly difficult for system operators to manage power quality and system balancing given the rapid expansion of intermittent energy sources and constrained capital expenditures. The UK is also uniquely exposed to volatile energy imports.
Customer and Regulatory Needs — Utilities must justly and reasonably meet the needs of varied customers in an affordable way:
Hyperscalers, aging generation assets, and a general demand for renewable energy exert significant pressure on U.S. utilities’ resources and time to power delivery. The combined pressures also increase grid congestion, lengthen interconnection queues, and complicate planning predictions, leading to the risk of under-serving customers. In turn, utilities are under increasing pressure from regulators to protect ratepayers from carrying the grid improvement costs incurred to serve data centers.
In the UK, concerns around elevated wholesale and retail energy prices, grid congestion, interconnection delays, and energy affordability and equity continue to exert pressure to address the structural uncompetitiveness of the nation’s energy system. As a result, utilities must carefully manage investment costs to satisfy regulators, while simultaneously meeting aggressive national decarbonization targets and customer needs related to electrification of vehicles and heating.
Business Model Improvement — Utilities must maintain business health to ensure continual business operations and appropriate returns to investors:
The tension between increasing investments in reliability, resilience, speed to power, and decarbonization, and preserving energy affordability and equity for customers, requires utilities in both the U.S. and UK to identify intelligent grid investments with business cases that prove out total system value and connect to overall business model improvements. Across generation, transmission and distribution, operations and maintenance, utilities must seek out ways to justify and recover the investments that build the grid of the future.
A Framework for Building Grid Intelligence
Grid intelligence enables better decision making in operations and maintenance, planning, and overall system investment. But building grid intelligence takes meaningful capital investment, data generation, readiness, people resources, and knowledge. This tension means that intelligence brings value but requires value investment to create.
An effective approach to intelligence building is to target the above problem statements related to reliability and resilience, customer and regulatory demands, and the need for affordable, high-value business models. These pressures are long-term rather than transitory, and as a result, investments that relieve these stressors will be robust to multiple future states of the world.
Solutions that address these problem statements include those targeting situational awareness and utilization of existing assets and building business cases for incremental investment.
Step 1: Developing Situational Awareness: The first no-regrets grid investment utilities should make is to develop situational awareness capabilities, adopting hardware and software solutions designed to improve reliability and resilience.
Situational awareness of system risks informs the set of interventions and investments the grid needs to be healthy. From fault and wildfire ignition detection to managing wind-driven galloping in power lines, situational awareness results in tangible benefits. Investments in situational awareness earn rapid returns, especially when considering reductions in liability and the risk of catastrophic loss.
Companies such as LineVision provide comprehensive situational awareness platforms combining optical and environmental sensors with advanced, physics-based modeling and machine learning to deliver real-time visibility into transmission networks, empowering operators with flexibility to respond where and when it matters most, while also helping utilities unlock and prioritize grid investments based on future needs.
Pano AI, another leading situational awareness provider, leverages a suite of hardware and software components blending camera imaging, AI, and cloud-based software for early wildfire detection, enabling rapid response by utilities and lowering the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
Step 2: Maximizing the Contribution of Existing Assets: The second intelligent grid investment utilities should make is to adopt technologies and platforms that make better use of existing grid assets. In the face of growing demand, energy affordability challenges, and regulatory scrutiny, utilities in the U.S. and the UK are under pressure to squeeze as much power as possible from the grid, before undertaking large capital expenditures.
Through precision monitoring and control, grid operators can use existing transmission and distribution lines to convey more power, and by using advanced system-level control technologies, utilities can better coordinate DERs and variable resources to increase power and grid capacity.
Through the information gained from situational awareness, dynamic line rating (DLR) solutions allow utilities to improve the utilization of existing infrastructure. Combining high-quality data with computational fluid dynamics and machine learning, LineVision’s network-scale DLR platform enables utilities to increase the flow of power through lines above their static carrying capacity, delivering more power with existing resources to reduce congestion costs and help interconnect new loads, while also potentially deferring the need for costly T&D upgrades.
DER management systems (DERMS) maximize the contribution of existing assets on the grid through integrated, precision monitoring and control. Schneider DERMS, for example, monitors and controls the interaction of DERs with the grid in real time, dispatching solar, wind, batteries, and other assets to support power quality while reducing distribution peaks, transmission congestion and system-wide capacity needs, allowing utilities to make better use of existing infrastructure.
Step 3: Procuring Highest-Value Marginal Improvements: The third step toward grid modernization is iteratively assessing risks and opportunities for improved customer service and building quantitative business cases for the next best investment.
Through a step-wise approach to successively procuring the highest-value incremental improvement, the utility builds trust and transparency with the customer and regulator while ensuring business health in uncertain times. By securing the larger wins first, and finer grain improvements in succession, the utility moves toward full network-wide grid intelligence, data and systems integration, and asset control over time.
Advanced metering by providers such as Itron, combined with edge DERMS systems by companies like Uplight bring the grid edge into better focus, allowing utilities to turn behind the meter DERs into dispatchable and controllable grid assets. Virtual power plants and energy orchestration platform providers such as Oracle move the utility towards real-time control and co-optimization of transmission, distribution and generation assets, both front of the meter and behind the meter, grid-wide.
Advanced substation sensing, transformer monitoring, partial discharge sensors, grid infrastructure digital twins, predictive asset failure models, AI-optimized crew scheduling platforms, and AI-based digital field tools are some of the investments utilities may prioritize as they adopt successively finer layers of grid-enhancing technologies.
An Intelligent Future-Facing Grid
Through strategic adoption and deployment of grid monitoring and intelligence solutions, utilities in the U.S. and UK can take incremental steps toward fully integrated, optimized grids and enhance energy security and affordability in the face of increased geopolitical, economic, and market uncertainty.
High-value, large reliability and resilience wins through situational awareness, paired with increases in the utilization and performance of existing assets, allow utilities to recoup early grid investments, paving the way for later investments in incremental enhancements over time.
