Grid Talk - Watt's New in Power | Feb 2026 Edition

Abhinav Gupta

Feb 17

9 min read

Updated: Sep 18

Let me first start of by saying a massive thank you to everyone who has been following GridTalk over the past couple of years (we are now at over 800+ subscribers which is just incredible). For those of you who have been around since Edition #1, you will remember that DTech holds a special place for us at Grid Transformation. It was at DTech 2024 where we had our very first booth at the Initiate Startup Arena and got to meet over a hundred folks from utilities, consulting firms, product vendors and fellow startup founders. Fast forward two years and here we are again, except the conversations on the show floor and in the sessions felt fundamentally different this time around. This years conference spanned 14+ tracks and I came away with several themes that came up across all the presentations at the conference.

“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost."

For the uninitiated, this line was penned by Tolkien in 1954 as part of a poem about Aragorn, the wandering ranger who is far more than he appears on the surface. The line always stuck with me because it flips expectations, the most valuable things in life don’t always look shiny and new and sometimes the folks who seem like they are wandering are actually on the most purposeful path of all. I think this is a fitting metaphor for where the electric utility industry finds itself today and after spending a week at DistribuTECH 2026.

The title of this post, and the Tolkien reference, is relevant because the electric utility industry right now is a lot like Aragorn. On the surface, it might look like a sector that is “wandering”, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent deploying ADMS, AMI, DERMS and distribution automation across utilities of all shapes and sizes, from cooperatives like Habersham EMC serving about 38,675 meters in the mountains of Georgia to investor-owned giants like Xcel Energy with 3.7 million customers and an $18.3 billion five-year capital plan. The procurement and installation phase is wrapping up. And yet, if you were to walk into most utility control rooms today, you would find that the majority of these advanced functions are still sitting in advisory mode. DTE Energy shared a five-year FLISR roadmap that does not get to full auto mode until 2029. Exelon, running ADMS across four operating companies (ComEd, PECO, BGE, PHI), learned the hard way in Release 1 that siloed testing across each OpCo creates integration bottlenecks that are extremely painful to untangle.

The industry has deployed the technology but is in the process of operationalizing it. That was the single biggest takeaway from the entire conference in my opinion. The hard part is not buying the technology, the hard part is getting operators to trust it, getting the data clean enough to run it reliably and getting the organization aligned to actually use what has been installed. SMUD with 700,000 customers, 60,000 PV systems and 70,000 EVs on their grid is now entering Phase 4 of their ADMS/DERMS journey which targets automatic control of non-SCADA DERs through 2028. That is a multi-year commitment that goes well beyond any single implementation project, and this is the kind of sustained effort that the industry needs to embrace.

Now, for those of you who read my earlier newsletters, you know I have been tracking the AI wave closely, from data center energy consumption to generative AI reshaping enterprises (check out Edition #1 and #2 if you haven’t already - links at the bottom). Well, at DTech 2026, AI was no longer a “future state” conversation. It was a “here is what we deployed and here are the results” conversation and that shift was palpable. SDG&E and Toumetis showed how they are predicting equipment failures using power quality data sampled at 61,440 samples per second (yes, you read that right). They saved 2.4 SAIDI minutes in 2024 alone by catching incipient faults before they turned into emergency outages. AEP Texas and Sensewaves are processing 105 million daily AMI data points across 1.1 million endpoints and in the process discovered 1,480 missing and 699 incorrect GIS relationships that were silently undermining their grid models. Xylem and Bidgely demonstrated natural language queries replacing SQL and GIS expertise for grid operators with a claimed 95% reduction in query time. Southern Company and CGI presented a cloud-native Meter Intelligence Hub that is replacing their old Hadoop-era systems with AI-driven transformer loading prediction and EV/solar detection.

But here is what I found most encouraging about all of this. Every single one of these presentations emphasized what the industry is calling “architectures of trust”, i.e., the AI has to be traceable, anchored to physics-based validation and constrained to read-only access. No one is handing over grid data to an AI model without appropriate guardrails and thought behind it. That is exactly the right approach for critical infrastructure and it should give us all confidence that the industry is being thoughtful about this rather than just chasing the hype.

Coming back to the DER conversation, back in my first newsletter in February 2024, I wrote about the existential question of “To DER or not to DER.” Two years later, that question has been answered pretty decisively. The industry has moved past visibility and is now deep into active dispatch, dynamic operating envelopes and market participation. PG&E’s DERMS is now delivering value 24/7/365, not just during grid emergencies like traditional demand response. Their Flex Connect program is enabling dynamic EV charging capacity using IEEE 2030.5 with approved aggregators, which is a pretty big deal for anyone watching the EV infrastructure buildout. ERCOT’s Aggregate DER pilot has grown to 65.2 MW deployed with another 124.5 MW in the pipeline, though the manual spreadsheet-driven administration is struggling to keep up (sound familiar to anyone who has worked at a utility? :D). Alectra Utilities in Ontario is building out a full DSO operating model, i.e., Sense, Forecast, Assess, Coordinate, Operate, Verify and embedding it into business-as-usual operations rather than treating it as a separate innovation project. For more on DSOs, check out the Grid Transformation blog here -> https://grid-transformation.com/blog/f/transition-to-the-dso-model---the-whys-pros-cons

And then there is the grid-forming inverter conversation that I found fascinating. EPRI, SCE and Duke Energy laid out the case that as synchronous generators retire and inverter-based DERs grow, grid-following inverters alone cannot maintain system stability. Grid-forming inverters provide sub-5-cycle voltage and frequency support, weak grid operation and even black start capability. European grid codes may soon mandate GFM capability. This is a fundamental shift in the power electronics architecture of the distribution grid and one that I think most folks outside the industry don’t fully appreciate yet.

On the cybersecurity front, SUBNET laid out the disconnect between IT Security Operations Centers and OT environments. IT security tools stop at the OT boundary and SOC analysts have no visibility into IED event logs, firmware versions or device configurations. Tampa Electric is now penetration testing reclosers and line sensors with the same rigor as IT assets which is exactly the right approach. And here is a number that should keep every utility executive up at night, 1,000 substations multiplied by 30 devices multiplied by 4 password levels equals 120,000+ passwords being managed with spreadsheets and email. That is not a sustainable model for anyone.

One of the more boring but essential parts of any advanced system - data quality, which is the least glamorous topic but probably the most important one. AEP Texas discovered 1,480 missing GIS relationships across 54 substations and 275 circuits. SRP had to build custom code in Snowflake because reading GIS topology took 36 hours (yes, 36 hours!). Ameren is building a Grid Network Model Management system of record to replace engineers manually reconciling spreadsheets across siloed systems. The universal lesson here is simple, your ADMS, your DERMS, your AI, your digital twin, they are all only as good as the data and models underneath them.

The most important and fundamental part of any organization and especially in our industry - the workforce side of things, we know that 50% of the utility workforce is retirement-eligible within the next 10 years while energy demand is projected to grow 25% by 2030. Let that sink in for a moment. Eversource folks shared how they built a “badge-less” one-team culture across 300+ people and 20+ vendors for their AMI deployment which I thought was a really smart approach to dealing with the complexity of multi-vendor programs. NYPA’s workforce readiness assessment revealed the classic adoption curve, champions on one end and folks experiencing genuine fear and anxiety about the pace of change on the other.

The other take away was the innovation coming from the cooperative community was outstanding. Habersham EMC, a Georgia cooperative with 38,675 meters in heavily wooded, mountainous terrain where trees and squirrels cause 80-90% of outages (I know, squirrels!), deployed over 400 reclosers and 14 automation schemes. The result? SAIDI down 27%, member satisfaction up from 85% to 96%. They leveraged their existing fiber broadband network as the communication backbone which is a smart move that many larger utilities are still working on. And then Kit Carson Electric Cooperative in New Mexico, serving just 31,000 meters, is building a $231 million hydrogen long-duration storage project funded by USDA, complete with three hydrogen hubs and projected 1,877 jobs. A cooperative with 31,000 meters doing a hydrogen project of that scale. These are the folks who are not wandering aimlessly, they know exactly where they are going.

If I had to sum up DTech 2026 in one sentence, it would be this, the industry has moved from asking “what technology should we implement?” to “how do we actually make all of this work together?” And that second question is fundamentally harder. The next phase requires sustained multi-year partnerships that span technology validation, cybersecurity lifecycle management, workforce readiness, data governance and regulatory strategy. The hardest problems are at the seams, ADMS and DERMS co-dependency, IT/OT convergence, data and model integrity across siloed systems. For us at Grid Transformation, this is exactly the space we have been building towards. The work ahead is complex, it is multi-disciplinary and it requires folks who understand both the technology and the organizational change that has to happen in parallel. I left the conference more energized than ever.

“With great power comes great responsibility”

I am sure most of you know this one! Feel free to drop the movie (or comic book) reference in the comments. :)

My daughter and I are watching animal documentaries these days and so, here is a nugget from the latest one that we watch a couple of weeks ago. Did you know that Humpback whales have been observed actively protecting penguins (and seals) from orca attacks in Antarctica by using their massive flippers to shield the smaller animals on ice floes. Scientists think it might be a kind of instinctive anti-predator behavior where the humpbacks just do NOT like orcas and will intervene on behalf of pretty much anyone being hunted by them. So basically, humpback whales are the unsolicited bodyguards of the Southern Ocean. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/humpback-whales-save-animals-killer-whales-explained

And finally, on a lighter note, I have been getting back into reading fiction after a long hiatus and am listening to the audiobook version of The Lord of the Rings. If you haven’t read it in a while, I highly recommend picking it up again.

For those who have been around from the early days of GridTalk, thank you so much for sticking with me and for all the new subscribers, welcome aboard! My humble request to folks who are subscribed is that if you find this newsletter useful or entertaining in any way, then please feel free to repost to your network and engage with me by liking and commenting on the post. As always, feel free to reach out to me here or via email abhinav@grid-transformation.com and follow Grid Transformation to keep up to speed with what we are doing and the latest in the industry as a whole.

Previous editions: Edition #1 | Edition #2

GridTalk will be back soon (this time in less than 2 year time). Till then, be safe and stay curious!