Quarterly Issue 3
Issue 3 - August 2026

Power Points | How AI is Lighting up the Electric Energy Sector

By Elisabeth Monaghan, Editor-in-Chief

Today, AI is no longer abstract. In fact, we're seeing everyone from large corporations to small businesses deploy AI to troubleshoot problems, increase productivity, analyze data, write marketing or creative briefs and serve as customer service chatbots. In the electric energy industry, AI has moved from strategy and possibility into a viable presence embedded in field forms, invoice validation, fault detection systems and customer engagement platforms.
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The Grid Transformation Forum | How Utilities Track Large Capital Programs: Field Data Collection to Real-Time Balanced Scorecard at Scale
CenterPoint Energy and Its More Than $3.0 Billion Grid Resilience Buildout

By Hari Vasudevan, Mythili Chaganti, Jerry Caldwell and Chris Harris

CenterPoint Energy's largest grid resilience infrastructure plan to build the most resilient coastal grid in the country is currently underway, with the Public Utilities Commission of Texas approving the more than $3 billion investment. CenterPoint Energy will continue its investments in the electric transmission system, including elevating more than 99% of substations above the 500-year floodplain and upgrading or rebuilding more than 2,200 transmission structures to improve overall reliability and resiliency.
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Green Ovations | The Human Grid Asset: Scaling Grid Stability through Gamification

By Alex Hill, Senior Manager at Sendero Consulting

While billions of dollars have been invested in smart hardware…grid stability remains at risk because the humans at the end of the wire remain largely unengaged. Getting customers engaged in solutions requires a new approach: activating the behavioral layer of the virtual power plant and cultivating the "human grid asset" - a strategy that turns aggregated demand flexibility into a resource that transforms passive customers into active grid participants.
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The Pole Problem: Closing the Field Gap in Wildfire Mitigation Before the Next Season

By Davoud Zamani, Gridwap

Undergrounding works. It is also, by the numbers, a generational program. PG&E launched the country's largest such effort in 2021, targeting 10,000 miles. It reached 1,000 completed miles in October 2025, and projects 1,600 by the end of 2026, an estimated 18% reduction in system wildfire risk. That is four years of the most aggressive undergrounding push any U.S. utility has attempted. It is also 16% of the goal.
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Building Supply-Chain Resilience in the Age of the Transformer Shortage

By James Whaley, GRID Infrastructure Solutions

For years, utilities have invested heavily in grid resiliency: hardening lines, modernizing substations, deploying microgrids and preparing for extreme weather. But now, supply chain resiliency has emerged as an equally essential discipline. If grid resiliency is about keeping the lights on during a storm, supply chain resiliency is about ensuring the equipment needed to build, expand and modernize the grid actually arrives.
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Managing AI Within Energy Fleets: Why the Hardest Problems Start After Deployment

By Andrew Foster, IOTech

Instead of asking if AI belongs in grid operations, people now talk about where and how to use it. Battery energy storage systems use predictive simulations at the asset level. Solar fleet operators use machine learning to help decide which maintenance tasks to prioritize. Distribution utilities are trying out edge-based analytics for things like voltage optimization, fault detection and demand response across their growing portfolios of distributed energy resources.
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Why Half of Utility AI Investments Aren't Paying Off, And What Changes That

By Everardo Camacho and Scott Foster, Delta Energy Communications

Across industries, 79% of enterprises have adopted AI agents in some form, but only 11% have them running in production — the largest deployment backlog in enterprise tech history — while a separate cross-study analysis finds 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver expected returns. But for utilities specifically, the obstacle is rarely the model. It's that AI tools optimize a single narrow task without ever connecting to the broader operational picture.
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Materials as an Asset Management Variable in T&D Reliability

By Dr. Nicolas Imlinger, Wacker Chemical Corp.

NERC's 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment identifies data centers and other large commercial and industrial loads as the leading source of projected demand growth over the next decade. Equipment manufacturers and utilities often evaluate these demands through electrical ratings, mechanical loads and service conditions. Material chemistry sits underneath each requirement because the formulation and processing of an insulating elastomer determine how the finished component behaves over time.
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Guest Editorial | Separating Signal from Noise: How Vertical AI Drives High-Definition Customer Engagement

By Gautam Aggarwal, Bidgely

Today, vertical AI is helping energy providers modernize legacy platforms to keep modern customers engaged and satisfied. Unlike generic models trained on broad internet text, energy-specific AI is engineered to separate signal from noise in massive streams of smart meter data. It filters out grid fluctuations to isolate the precise energy "signatures" of individual appliances, such as HVAC cycles, electric vehicle (EV) chargers, or water heaters.
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Guest Editorial | AI Energy Trade-Off: Refining Grids for a Greener Tomorrow

By April Miller, ReHack

Artificial intelligence is creating new opportunities across the energy sector, from grid optimization to demand forecasting. However, the infrastructure that powers AI requires significant amounts of electricity. As more industries adopt AI, energy and sustainability leaders must balance growing demand with the need for efficient and lower-carbon operations.
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Guest Editorial | When Utility Fleets Become Operational Risks

By Michelle Way, Element Fleet Management

For utilities of all sizes, the work required to maintain company vehicles can sneak up on their managers. What starts out as a small collection of work trucks can quickly turn into a diverse fleet of specialized vehicles that support nearly every aspect of field operations and require much greater oversight. For utility managers, it's crucial to recognize that while fleet sizes grow in size and complexity, so should the processes used to manage them.
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Quarterly Issue 3
Issue 3 - August 2026

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Quarterly Issue 3 Issue 3 - August 2026

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Quarterly Issue 3
Issue 3 - August 2026