Crystal Ball 2025: Outlook for the power and utility sector

Decentralized power will change the energy landscape, driving new opportunities and challenges. In 2025, there will be a continued shift towards a more decentralized power grid as technology advances, regulatory and clean-energy policy objectives progress, and load demand creates grid congestion.

While utilities will need to address the challenges of maintaining a balanced and reliable grid with changing grid dynamics, others see this as an opportunity for expanding business models, such as independent power producers (IPPs) and microgrid operators.

As the power and utility industry ecosystem expands, utilities’ role and technology priorities will evolve as the industry grapples with balancing a more complicated grid.

The year of an evolving utility control room

Driven by holistic network model data, the utility control room of the future will begin to take shape. The role of traditional utilities is evolving as they face new dynamics and challenges in managing their business objectives.

To get ahead, utilities will increasingly rely on network model driven software solutions as a single source of truth for OT and IT stakeholders at utilities, and the more robust and accessible the model is across the organization, the more intelligent and successful the utility will become.

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This data-centric infrastructure will improve alignment across planning, operations, and maintenance functions while also enabling interoperability with external operators to truly enable the utility of the future.

A cautious approach to AI as a way to build efficiency

Utilities will look to AI cautiously as a way to improve operational efficiency in the face of an onslaught of data, more complex operations, and resource shortages.

Utilities are already starting to use AI to help manage increasing grid complexity. Power generation is set to nearly triple by 2050, requiring corresponding growth in the electric grid. This growth will add new assets to the grid that will provide more data back to control rooms than ever before.

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The perfect storm of power generation and grid infrastructure growth with new technologies and consumer-engagement will drive an exponential growth in data to be sorted, managed, and acted upon within the utility. Gone are the days of paper maps, whiteboard job orders, and limited field crew communication.

As veteran utility workforces are set to retire, a new generation of utility operators require AI technology to sort through the noise of complex grid data to ensure safe, efficient, and resilient utility service.