Electrify Everything 2026

Five Years of Electrify Everything

At Energize, we've spent the last ten years tracking the electrification of everything, and the last five years publishing our research and perspectives on the innovations in the energy and industrial sectors powering it.

When we first published our Electrify Everything report in 2022, our thesis was linked to the macro trends we saw defining the energy transition: a movement towards electrified renewables as a major source of generation in the U.S., correlated consumer trends towards distributed and electrified generation (solar, batteries, EVs), and calls for an increasingly decarbonized grid. At that time, we predicted an increased flow of capital into the systems that enable the deployment and management of electricity, from generation to transmission & distribution, as well as the mechanisms servicing those loads. As that physical ecosystem grew, so did the digital infrastructure that enables it.

In several ways, we called these trends correctly. Since 2022, installed solar capacity in the U.S. has nearly tripled to 300+ GW¹, storage capacity has grown 5 times², and distributed energy resource deployments have surpassed 700 GW in the U.S. and Europe³. Electrified technologies have become synonymous with advanced, reliable energy systems, and the past five years of grid strain, geopolitical turbulence, and intensifying climate events have only bolstered that position.

What we could not have foreseen is the degree to which AI, data centers, and the platform shift underway in our economies would have a cascading impact on the energy and industrial sectors. Today's massive increase in electrified energy demand comes not merely from EVs and consumer pressure, but from the desperate demands of power-hungry data centers and the aging, strained infrastructure that is working to service this growing load. This is a core focus for this year's 2026 Electrify Everything report: As growing power demand meets a capacity-constrained grid, the entire energy ecosystem is now competing for access to more electrons, quicker.

No matter the catalyst, the fact stands that the electrification of everything is well underway. From data center energy demand to industrial reshoring, to broader residential, commercial, and industrial electrification, global forces are challenging us to reimagine our systems and chart new routes toward energy abundance and resilience. And renewable technologies, powered by AI and other digital innovations, continue to provide the fastest, lowest-cost, most reliable path to this power.

Electrify Everything 2026 highlights those innovations. For our fifth year, we present Energize's take on the technologies underpinning the next chapter of the energy economy, from the companies working in the middle of the AI spotlight (like data center flexibility) to the ones navigating its ripple effects: commercial and industrial solutions, VPPs, infrastructure maintenance, and compliance. Explore all our top picks and download our complete research report at our official Electrify Everything webpage:

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1. Data center flexibility: Finding capacity on a constrained grid

In 2026, it is impossible to write about power demand and speed-to-power without writing about data centers. U.S. data center demand is expected to climb from 31 GW in 2025 to 41-56 GW in 2026, and 66-69 GW the year after⁴. By 2035, that figure is expected to reach 194 GW - a 6x increase in a decade, and more than the entire U.S. residential sector's consumption today. But the grid's energy supply and infrastructure are not keeping pace with this growth. Interconnection queues in some regions now stretch five to seven years, and power has become the limiting factor on AI development.

Data centers have also become persona non grata in many communities. As utilities spend more to build infrastructure that serves these energy giants, those costs are passed on to local communities, who then see their own rates rise.

None of these challenges are new; they've been in the headlines for the past two years. But the market is now invested in finding new and creative solutions, both to solve speed-to-power and to make better use of existing grid infrastructure.

One of those solutions is flexibility. In February 2025, a Duke University study found that if data centers modestly curtailed their energy usage during the highest-demand hours, "nearly 100 GW of large new loads could be integrated with minimal impact."⁵ Today, many data centers run well below their maximum utilization, but utilities size grid connections based on peak demand rather than average draw, so much of that allocated grid capacity sits underutilized. Solutions like Emerald AI are helping bridge this gap between utilities and data center operators, orchestrating and flexing AI workloads alongside on-site energy so that new and existing data centers can unlock more capacity, limiting the need for oversized grid connections or new grid infrastructure.

But there are many flavors to solving the "speed to power" challenge. GridCARE is another good example. The company uses AI to identify and activate near-term grid capacity, helping hyperscalers, utilities, and energy providers find underutilized capacity on the grid⁶.

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2. Commercial and industrial energy: Powering the forgotten loads

While data centers are at the center of today's energy story, they are certainly not the circumference of it. For years, large energy customers, like hospitals and manufacturing facilities, have relied on reasonably stable electricity prices and predictable access to the grid. But as demand and congestion grow, commercial and industrial sectors are feeling the effects of sudden power constraints.

Further, these large (but not largest) loads have taken second seat to the demands from data center giants. Many are now competing - at a disadvantage - for the same constrained grid capacity that data centers and hyperscalers, which have more leverage and money, also seek. For example, PJM, the mid-Atlantic and Midwest's regional transmission organization, now requires large load customers to fund grid upgrades. While a data center developer can easily pay for this for speed and access to power, a mid-size manufacturer may not have the same flexibility. And unlike solar and battery developers, which work within an interconnection queue, large commercial and industrial customers have no equivalent process - at least for now.

Flexibility has become the name of the game in this sector as well. Whether deploying onsite generation and capacity (i.e., solar + batteries), more intelligently procuring power, or finding ways to better manage energy loads within production environments, C&I customers across the U.S. and Europe are investing in the solutions that can help them make optimal energy decisions. For example, 5 helps mid-market C&I businesses navigate energy procurement and management, pairing specialist advisory with digital products. In doing so, they enable these customers to maximize energy access while managing energy costs.

Similarly, companies like Critical Loop are focused on bridging the gap between power available on the grid and C&I customer demand. They partner with large industrial and manufacturing loads to deploy on-site control, generation, and battery systems so that sites can be flexible to the limitations and lead times for more energy from the grid, while still gaining access to the power they need today for production and growth.

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3. Virtual power plants: What's real and what's an illusion

As customers vie for affordable, reliable energy access, stakeholders must now reimagine where that energy can come from. Beyond on-site or near-site sources, capacity is increasingly coming from coordinated, distributed loads.

Distributed energy resources (DERs), like EV chargers, heat pumps, and residential batteries, are becoming a promising solution to many of the grid's leading challenges from C&I settings to the residential scale at the grid edge. In the face of increasing price volatility, growing costs, and constrained capacity, DERs have the potential to unlock additional capacity and smooth energy peaks if organized and optimized in the right way.

That's where virtual power plants (VPPs) come in. A VPP aggregates thousands of distributed assets and manages them collectively, generating, storing, and discharging electricity at optimal times. VPPs are not a new solution, but a convergence of factors is helping them have a renaissance. First, the scale of deployment of DERs has become grid-relevant, making it possible to dispatch to the grid with an actual tangible effect. There is now over 270 GW of DER capacity installed across residential and commercial sectors in the U.S. today, including 30 GW of VPP dispatchable or available capacity that can be leveraged to service the grid or meet demand⁷.

Second, energy policy is catching up: the U.K. now lets DERs participate directly in the wholesale market, and the U.S. passed FERC Order 2222, which creates a path for distributed resources to access energy markets.

Third, the tech stack to connect and manage these assets has matured, thanks to the rollout of smart meters, easy API access, and a growing suite of AI applications. This has increased our ability to connect fragmented assets, manage their behavior in response to grid signals, and translate that flexibility into market revenue.

For example, Axle enables energy suppliers, retailers, and other businesses to offer flexibility services by connecting home energy assets to electricity flexibility markets. And Light operates like white-label infrastructure, letting companies, like solar installers and EV automakers, offer their own branded electricity plans without becoming licensed utilities.

And since VPPs are faster and cheaper to deploy than virtually any other new infrastructure, hyperscalers are recognizing their value, too-as exemplified by the recent partnership between Google and demand flexibility platform Voltus.

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4. Asset lifecycle management: Getting more from what's already there

The electrification of everything relies just as much on maintaining operational electrified assets as it does deployment of new assets. The U.S. today has a massive installed base of solar, wind, and battery assets that have been deployed over the past ten years. By incrementally increasing the useful life of those assets, we can not only increase grid capacity, but significantly reduce the capital required to service growing loads.

That said, much of the U.S. energy grid is running on borrowed time. The average U.S. transformer is 38-40 years old, designed for 40 years of service on a grid that scarcely resembles today's. Similarly, overhead transmission lines average 40 years old against a design life of 50-80.

Unfortunately, the U.S. lacks the domestic supply chain - and the workforce - to maintain, repair, and replace this infrastructure. For example, 80% of large power transformers are imported, and it takes 2.5 years on average (and often longer) to produce a power transformer. Meanwhile, skilled workers managing grid assets are retiring faster than they can be replaced, even as capital expenditures for new power are expected to surge in the next decade.

Due to these dynamics, there is a clear opportunity for asset owners to improve productivity and extend asset lifetime through better maintenance of the assets they already operate. These operators collect enormous amounts of multimodal operational data, from SCADA systems, environmental sensors, drones, cameras, and other sensor-based monitoring, that has historically gone underused. New software makes it possible to extract far more value from this data: AI can flag anomalies before they become failures, predictive analytics can quantify an asset's remaining useful life and prioritize investment across a portfolio, and digital twins, virtual replicas of physical assets, can model cause and effect to guide decisions.

This kind of predictive maintenance extends asset life and cuts costs for emergency repairs, which are typically three to five times more expensive than planned ones. For example, Bright AI deploys autonomous sensors and edge AI models to monitor critical infrastructure assets, catching degradation before failure. And Treeswift uses drone robotics and computer vision to automate transmission line and vegetation corridor inspections at a scale and speed that manual aerial surveys alone can't match.

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5. Grid compliance: Staying ahead of a moving target

Asset owners and operators are not the only stakeholders taking notice of asset maintenance and reliability. As the grid grows more distributed, strained, and complex, grid operators and regulatory bodies are scrutinizing how assets interact with it. That scrutiny raises the bar for consistent, verifiable asset monitoring.

Owners and operators of energy assets in the U.S. must adhere to a web of overlapping regulatory requirements, ranging from FERC at the federal level, to regional ISO operating rules, to state public utility requirements. And as the grid has grown more complex, so too have these regulations. A recent ERCOT (Texas) standard is an example. In previous years, during periods of grid distress in Texas, renewable plants would disconnect from the grid. This protected the plants but worsened the disturbance for the grid. In response, ERCOT's new NOGRR-245 regulation required plants to "ride through" those events rather than disconnect. The rule made the grid more stable, but it also created a new regulatory and compliance obligation for asset owners.

This is just one example of the increasing scrutiny grid-connected assets face, while facing penalties for non-compliance. In fact, FERC has assessed more than $905 million in penalties since 2007, and these penalties have become more frequent and more severe.

To stay in compliance, owners and operators typically hire professional services firms, which charge exorbitant fees. One developer, evaluating compliance services for its plant portfolio, received quotes of $200,000 to $400,000 per plant per year.

But much of the work required for compliance is well-suited for AI automation. AI compliance platforms can consolidate regulatory requirements, automate routine data entry and workflow tasks, and surface gaps in compliance - all while keeping human engineers in the loop. The most successful solutions will have the right balance of AI automation and expertise from humans, who can keep AI outputs explainable, auditable, accurate, and secure.

For example, GridStrong's AI-powered platform automates complex regulatory workflows, from power system modeling to grid event analysis, so that asset owners can interconnect faster and maintain continuous compliance.

And Atomic Canyon built Neutron, an AI trained on NRC documentation, to help nuclear plant operators search and navigate the agency's unwieldy regulatory database, cutting the need for manual document sifting.

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Closing

The themes covered in our 2026 Electrify Everything report emphasize a common story: an energy system straining under demand it wasn't built for, and a wave of digitally-enabled solutions stepping in to close the gap faster than new infrastructure, hardware capex, and other investments can do alone. The urgency surrounding these solutions is felt across the energy and industrial markets, with a focus on visibility, speed to power, and orchestration across complex stakeholders making the crucial decisions impacting the energy economy.

Whether it's data centers or C&I customers finding ways to be flexible with grid connections, aggregations of distributed assets into virtual power plants, or detailed solutions for improved asset maintenance and compliance, these solutions are focused on modernizing a physical system that can't be rebuilt on AI's timeline.

Data centers will keep the headlines given their scale and relevance to AI supercycles. But at Energize, we believe the demand they represent is a preview of what the rest of the economy is about to feel. Industrial reshoring, electrification of transport, and electrified homes are all converging on the same constrained system, at the same time. That system's success won't just be decided by how much new generation or grid infrastructure gets built; it will rely on how well we use what's already there.

These factors demonstrate the need and urgency behind Electrify Everything - which are suddenly the systems powering, and at times constraining, the next era of not only the energy sector, but the AI solutions driving forward a fundamental shift across the globe.

Source Materials

1. BloombergNEF, U.S. Solar Capacity Forecasts, 2026.

2. BloombergNEF, Energy Storage Outlook 2026, 2026.

3. Energize Capital Analysis, 2026.

4. Goldman Sachs Research, US Data Center Power Demand Projected to Double by 2027, 2025.

5. Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Duke University, Rethinking Load Growth: Assessing the Potential for Integration of Large Flexible Loads in US Power Systems, 2025.

6. GridCARE, 2025.

7. Energize Capital Analysis, 2026.