Ep596 Energy security in the age of AI: What do we need for a more resilient grid?

As the ADIPEC 2026 conference gets under way, energy security and resilience are the central themes. Technological advances and international conflicts are creating new physical and cyber threats to energy supplies and infrastructure. The energy industry is being called on to provide resilience and supply security, which means seeing the risk of disruption early and adapting before it can spread.
Host Ed Crooks is joined by Caspar Herzberg, CEO of AVEVA, a UK-based industrial software company owned by Schneider Electric, to examine how data and software can strengthen the resilience of grids and other energy systems in the face of these emerging threats.
Caspar argues that energy security depends on visibility across the whole system: operating assets, logistics, inventories and suppliers. AVEVA’s “living digital twin” brings operational data together across assets and supply chains, helping decision-makers spot emerging constraints and act faster. The challenge is not just collecting more data, but using it to make decisions under pressure.
Digital infrastructure is increasingly part of the security question. Data centers and subsea cables can become targets. That is prompting a rethink of where critical data lives, from global cloud services to regional and on-premises systems, alongside demand for more redundancy and regulation.
That means investing both in distributed micro grids and in large-scale macro grids that can be “bigger than the weather”. Distributed systems and renewable generation can make power supplies harder to disrupt, while larger grids can balance weather-driven output across regions. For Caspar, a more resilient energy system means a mix of generation sources, stronger connections between grids, more local resilience and investment in digital distribution networks. Making that happen takes political will, long-term investment and stable policy.
The AI boom creates opportunities as well as threats. Caspar says data centers should be planned as industrial sites, with better workload visibility, optimized cooling and flexibility that does not compromise reliability. Increasingly, large data centers are going to have to be net contributors to the stability of the grid, he thinks. AI-driven power demand can cut both ways: it can strain reliability and drive up costs for households, or it can support the grid and help hold costs down by providing additional flexibility. The impact of new large data centers will depend critically on how they are designed and operated.

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