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National Grid Partners

The utility industry is facing a defining moment amidst unprecedented changes around the globe. The time-trusted ways we’ve delivered and managed power for more than a century no longer suffice. Surging demand is testing every stage of the electricity supply chain, from generation to consumption, while climate instability pushes us to pursue new levels of resilience. And customers, from homeowners to hyperscalers, are asking for more of their utility while maintaining affordability. 

This moment demands new tools and ways of innovative, collaborative thinking from utilities and energy startups. At National Grid Partners, we know collaboration is crucial--the time for going alone is over. That’s why we founded the NextGrid Alliance, a peer network of senior innovation leaders spanning 150+ global utilities. Across industry, we face similar hurdles and constraints. And each year, we host the NextGrid Alliance Summit to help create a venue that helps share ideas, insights, and solutions. During our 3rd annual NGA Summit in Boston, one truth became clear: the challenges ahead require courage, creativity, and collaboration at a scale our industry has never achieved before. 

This year’s NextGrid Alliance Summit convened utility executives, innovation leaders, startup investors, entrepreneurs and energy experts from leading technology companies to tackle some of the thorniest challenges in the energy space.  

We discussed how residential energy customers today are more engaged, informed, and empowered than ever. They’ve become active participants in consuming and optimizing their energy use, deciding how they generate, store, and manage power through solar arrays, EVs, battery storage solutions, and smart home systems. The grid-customer relationship is becoming two-way, which requires new approaches to responsiveness, data integration, billing, and product design. 

And managing this shift was certainly top of mind at the Summit. During our Utility C-suite executives plenary panel, they underscored that affordability and customer value must be treated as strategic pillars, not trade-offs, as utilities modernize the grid. Leaders emphasized that enabling growth requires bold investment, but success hinges on keeping customers engaged and demonstrating tangible value in return. Building on that, our CIO panel identified that they must bridge the gap between legacy data and the needs of the contemporary world. Further, academic partners challenged utilities to rethink long-held assumptions.  

From Passive Consumers to Active Partners: Redefining the Grid-Customer Relationship

At the same time, another type of customer is reshaping our industry: large-scale tech companies like Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, whose data centers come with unprecedented and time-sensitive energy requirements.  We have entered a period of rapid change where conventional approaches cannot keep up. The only way to serve both sets of customers is to innovate, and today, that means harnessing artificial intelligence across every facet of our business. 

During one of the plenary panels, leaders from Google, EmeraldAI, Oncor Electric Delivery, GridCARE and QTS Data Centers revealed how AI can help utilities curtail demand during critical moments, unlocking new capacity from data centers. Through solutions offered by companies like Emerald AI and GridCARE, data centers, once seen as grid stressors, can become grid assets by shifting the time or location of non-critical compute loads. We also learned about emerging technologies like dynamic line ratings from Line Vision and advanced conductors from TS Conductor to help unearth headroom in places where the grid is constrained.  

While these technologies offer promising solutions, their impact on the grid will rely on strong partnerships between utilities, startups, and regulators.  We can leverage our existing grid infrastructure if we embrace innovation and flexibility through collaboration. One of the plenary discussions captured the sentiment - collaboration isn’t an accessory to innovation; it is the infrastructure of innovation. 

As the utility industry embraces this new era of rapid change, executives are highlighting how AI is more than a tool for efficiency, but a driving force for reimagining what’s possible. In her opening keynote, Melissa Lott, Partner GM of Microsoft’s Energy Group, highlighted that “AI tools go beyond optimizing infrastructure. They open up unimaginable possibilities and address massive problems in mind-blowing amounts of time.” At the same time Priya Donti, Associate Professor at MIT, and a Co-Founder of Climate Change AI, encouraged utilities to move from “technology takers” to “technology shapers”, co-designing solutions with academia, startups and partners to meet the unprecedented demands ahead.  

AI and Load Growth Are Rewriting the Utility Playbook

Building on this spirit of collaboration and innovation, utility leaders shared strategies for adopting technology to tackle operational challenges. This is most evident in the construction and maintenance of critical infrastructure, where AI-driven solutions are delivering improvements in speed, safety, and efficiency. For example, we heard from leaders at Sensat who showcased their AI-based visualization technology to better survey and map potential transmission sites. In just a day or two, they can produce highly detailed 3D renderings of a site; work that typically takes weeks. Sensat’s visualization and data driven collaboration saved National Grid 6 months of work and delays in new construction, while uncovering a costly delta between route options.  

Additionally, Southern California Edison shared how Exodigo’s AI-driven underground mapping is helping identify up to 30% more underground obstacles than traditional methods, reducing delays and enabling substations to expand on tighter footprints as load accelerates. Likewise, Exelon highlighted how Urbint’s AI-based risk assessment is helping proactively flag and prevent high-energy hazards in the fields, creating the kind of operational resilience that fast-changing load profiles now require. 

Finally, National Grid’s New England team shared how AiDASH’s aerial imagery and AI analytics have streamlined their vegetation management processes. This technology helped them cut tree-related outages by ~30%, showing the impact of data-driven solutions on reliability and safety. 

These achievements underscore how collaborative innovation, bringing together utilities, technology partners, and industry experts, is driving meaningful progress and shaping a more resilient future for the sector. 

Collaborative Case Studies: AI Technologies Solving Utility Challenges

This year’s gathering convened nearly 250 attendees and 65 speakers, representing 46 utilities from North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. More than 100 one-on-one meetings took place, alongside working sessions, startup showcases, highlighting attendees’ appetite for opportunities to collaborate and seek out vetted, actionable solutions from one another. The forces reshaping our industry-AI, electrification, climate instability, and customer empowerment-are too complex for siloed progress. We must all move faster, collaborate deeper, and think more boldly than ever before. As Robin Lanier, Managing Director at Georgia Power put it: “Being able to talk across the industry and have real conversations with customers, startups, and other utilities really helps us with collaboration and helps turn bold ideas into meaningful impact.” 

Access the Post-Summit Report | Watch the Highlights Video 

Aaron Panzer is a Director at National Grid Partners, where he heads Venture Acceleration team. 

NextGrid Alliance Summit 2025: Collaboration in a Time of Transformation