T&D

Battery storage developer Viridi has announced a strategic partnership with the Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee to support research into next-generation utility grid technologies that advance grid resilience and reliability.

The pace of change in energy markets has never been faster. Price signals that once evolved over days now shift within settlement windows. Geopolitical shocks that once took weeks to propagate through commodity markets now ripple across interconnected European power grids and global liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply chains in hours. And amid this acceleration, […]

The explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) computing is, for most utilities, a problem to be absorbed: gigawatts of new data-center demand arriving faster than transmission can be planned or built. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Genesis Mission does not dispute that framing. But buried in the national research portfolio it unveiled July 22 is […]

Artificial intelligence and high-performance computing have helped electrical utilities modernize how they model, forecast, and manage grid operations. These tools already play a central role in maintaining reliability, balancing supply and demand, and planning new infrastructure. But as electrical grids become more distributed, data-intensive, and renewable-heavy, some of the most complex decision-making problems are becoming […]

The Siemens name is coming off one of the power industry’s largest equipment and service suppliers. Siemens Energy announced July 14 that it has begun preparing the transition to an independent corporate brand, with Siemens Energy and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy to be united under a single new name: Omterra. The rebranding process is scheduled […]

Why AI Data Centers Can No Longer Be Treated as Passive Customers For decades, even very large electric customers fit inside a familiar planning model. A factory, refinery, industrial campus, hospital complex, hospital system, or manufacturing facility requested service. The utility studied the load, identified required facilities, assigned costs, and folded the demand into its […]

The U.S. Department of Energy has closed a loan of up to $3.26 billion to AEP Texas to finance a portfolio of nearly 100 transmission projects, the agency’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) said on July 8. The financing will fund the rebuilding, reconductoring, and new construction of roughly 2,800 miles of transmission lines across […]

X-energy Advances 6-GW Nuclear Partnership With UK’s Centrica. Advanced nuclear reactor developer X-energy on June 2 said it submitted an application for the UK’s Generic Design Assessment (GDA)—the

Data center developers have mastered server density and cooling, but power interconnection remains stubbornly slow. Modular substations built in factories rather than fields are emerging as the most practical

For much of the past decade, the climate and energy debate has been fixated on how electricity is generated: which technologies are cheapest on paper, how renewables can scale fastest, which breakthrough is

The U.S. averages 470 GW of demand, reaches summer peaks of 759 GW, and has 1,250 GW of generation capacity. Does that sound like a grid running out of power? PJM’s latest capacity auction signals the need for an additional 14.9 GW of power resources, while the industry is expected to invest $1.4 trillion over […]

Wildfires are no longer isolated disasters limited to the western United States—they are a growing threat to communities, infrastructure, and electric grid reliability nationwide. For the 42 million Americans served by electric cooperatives, the risk is especially acute. Co-ops power more than half the nation’s landmass, primarily in rural areas where wildfire danger is highest […]

NextNav, a Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) company with a history of telecommunications mergers, requested a rule change that would allow it to build out a network of high-power broadband operations. The proposed rule would impact every U.S. electric utility.

Utilities, federal agencies, and the national labs have finally assembled the tools to harden the grid against an increasingly hostile environment. The question is whether they can put them together fast enough. When a line of storms tore across the Northeast in late April 2025, racing from Ohio into central Pennsylvania, meteorologists recognized the signature […]

Summer is the season utilities brace for. Demand peaks as air conditioners run flat out, equipment runs hot, and the workforce that keeps the grid alive does so under some of the year’s most punishing conditions. The same months that strain transformers and conductors also strain the people climbing structures and pulling cable beneath them. […]

The power generation sector, including electric utilities and grid operators, recognizes the value of moving equipment underground to mitigate outages, lessen risks to assets, and reduce the chances of that equipment causing a wildfire.

Companies are deploying a variety of strategies in efforts to strengthen the power grid against severe weather and other issues.

From EOP-012-3 to Order 587-AB, from Cold Weather Critical Component inventories to dual-fuel conversions, the bulk power system has spent five years rewiring how it prepares for extreme cold. Winter Storm Fern, the latest test, showed the system ran “very close to the edge.” The last five winters have given the North American power sector […]

Extreme weather is making one thing clear—hardening of the power grid alone is not enough to solve the problem of keeping the lights on.

The power sector recognizes the urgent need to harden the power grid, which involves upgrading and fortifying electrical infrastructure to withstand severe weather, cyberattacks, and surging demand for electricity. The U.S. Dept. of Energy is providing billions of dollars to groups involved with modernizing the grid, underscoring the importance of measures designed to support power […]

Grid operators, utilities, and project developers are facing several enormous demands at once. They’re being asked to deliver capacity for a wave of new load from data centers, electric vehicle (EV) charging networks, and electrified buildings, while at the same time integrating a record pipeline of new generation from utility-scale solar, wind, and battery storage. […]

Dr. Remy Notermans, director of Strategic Planning for Atom Computing, a Boulder, Colorado-based group developing large-scale quantum computers, recently provided POWER with information about how quantum computing works. Notermans discussed how quantum computing can benefit electric utilities and the power generation sector.

Data centers have traditionally depended on uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems and backup generators to keep them online during a power cut, grid event, or natural disaster. But the critical nature of modern artificial intelligence (AI) workloads is such that there is no tolerance of downtime. Further measures must be in place to ensure energy […]

The requests flooding interconnection queues come from data center developers, private equity funds, land brokers, and shell companies, many of whom lack site control, a construction timeline, or even a signed customer. They secure a queue position, bet that powered land will attract a buyer, and wait. The industry calls them “phantom data centers,” and the grid isn’t prepared to handle them.

How industrial middleware unlocks the full value of operational data AI and why most AI programs fail without it   Power companies are being asked to deliver higher reliability while their operating environment becomes more dynamic. Conventional power generation: must run with greater flexibility, grid assets must absorb new load patterns, renewable portfolios must operate […]

Behind even the smallest convenience powered by AI is a massive surge of computing power for training models and inference. All that computing power requires energy.

Utilities are under increasing pressure to move distributed energy resources (DER) through interconnection queues more quickly. In many regions, review timelines have stretched from months into years as requests for solar, storage, and electric vehicle infrastructure continue to rise.

On May 5, 2026, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released its CI Fortify initiative, new guidance instructing electric utilities and other critical infrastructure (CI) operators to plan for a geopolitical crisis in which their operational technology (OT) networks are actively compromised and/or their connectivity to telecommunications, internet, vendors, and service providers is gone. […]

Grid capacity and the interconnection queue aren’t the only constraints on U.S. data center growth. Community acceptance is becoming the toughest bottleneck to break through, and a hot political topic with the approach of the midterm elections.

The electric vehicle (EV) charging conversation in America has focused largely on hardware: how many ports, what power level, where to locate them. That framing misses the more consequential challenge. Projected EV adoption this decade requires a public charging network far larger than the one operating today. Meeting that demand requires grid infrastructure that does […]