2026 Utility Innovation Survey: Industry leaders turning more to AI as data-center boom reshapes grid planning

National Grid Partners survey of U.S. utility innovation leaders finds 78% use artificial intelligence to manage rising power demand, as industry works to keep pace with rapid change

National Grid Partners, the corporate venture capital and innovation arm of one of the world's largest energy companies, today unveiled its third annual Utility Innovation Survey. It found utilities – faced with rising power demand from AI data centers – increasingly are deploying artificial intelligence to manage that demand, boost reliability and cut costs.

Nearly three-fourths of utility innovation leaders surveyed (74%) say AI-driven data center load growth is impacting grid reliability. Yet even more (78%) said they're deploying or operationalizing at least one AI application to manage interconnection demand.

The rapid growth of AI data centers is creating new operational and financial pressures for our industry, but AI also can be a significant part of the solution.

The findings were revealed at the fourth annual NextGrid Alliance Summit, where leaders from more than 50 worldwide utilities shared strategies to accelerate innovation. National Grid founded the Alliance to encourage collaboration between utilities, regulators and startups.

In another sign of the pressure AI data centers are placing on power infrastructure, the survey found grid reliability has overtaken net zero as a top industry concern. When asked to rank their organizational priorities, 73% of utility leaders placed reliability in their top three (up from 43% in 2025). Meanwhile, net-zero goals fell from 54% to 16%

The Innovation Survey also found the ability to scale solutions remains uneven. While 72% of utility leaders report increased innovation budgets this year, project deployment timelines continue to stretch: 84% of organizations now take more than a year to move projects from pilot to full rollout, up from 78% in 2025 and 66% in 2024. As in prior years, respondents cited reasons including a dearth of workers skilled in AI and the industry's traditionally cautious culture. Most innovation spending (59%) goes toward incremental improvements, compared with just 16% directed toward transformational initiatives.

Notably, 87% of those surveyed also say returns on innovation investments are being limited by regulatory and rate-case frameworks developed before the current AI-driven demand boom. And 83% say the cost of building infrastructure to serve AI data centers is being passed on to residential customers through higher electricity bills.

National Grid this week became a founding member of the AI Energy Management Alliance (AMEA), a consortium of technology leaders Google and NVIDIA; AI startups such as Anthropic and Emerald AI; and other major utilities including RWE, Constellation, and NRG. The group will push for policies that encourage the development of flexible data centers, which can automatically reduce power usage during periods of peak demand and buffer surrounding communities from price spikes. Emerald AI is part of the National Grid Partners portfolio. Last December, it led a pilot in the UK with National Grid and NVIDIA that found AI software could cut data center energy use during simulated grid strain by more than a third in under a minute – while still protecting the data center's most critical workloads.

By working with startups and scaling proven innovation, utilities can better manage demand, improve reliability and support economic growth while minimizing impact on local communities. In fact, the new Innovation Survey found utilities increasingly are partnering with startups for innovative technologies. The share of respondents whose companies do so rose from 28% last year to 34% in 2...