Resilient, Timely, and Affordable
As a Director with Clarum Advisors, Molly Podolefsky leverages her experience in economics, decarbonization, corporate sustainability, corporate finance, and the power and utilities sector to help innovative, clean tech companies.
Alexina Jackson is a creative problem solver who thrives in collaboration, tackling big questions and setting transformational vision. As the founder of Seven Green Strategy and Senior Advisor at Clarum Advisors, Alexina leverages her experience in consulting, law, and technological and commercial innovation.
As 2026 starts, electric utilities on both sides of the Atlantic continue to find themselves in a period of volatile geopolitical change and rapid power system evolution. U.S. utilities continue to face rapid demand growth driven by AI and increasing end-use electrification amidst challenging operating conditions due to aging infrastructure, increasingly severe and destructive environmental events, and increasing renewable energy penetration, against a market background of worsening grid congestion, affordability issues, and evolving federal priorities and funding requirements.
In the UK, utilities also grapple with aging infrastructure, rapidly rising energy costs and affordability concerns, and frequent regulatory and policy shifts, while seeking to attract investment to build a digital economy for the future, and at the same time pushing ahead with decarbonization on pace to meet the country’s aggressive 2050 net-zero emissions target.
Utilities in both markets need 2026 strategies that are resilient to these internal and external system pressures to make grid investments with confidence under uncertainty.
This article describes a path to building healthy, modernized, and intelligent grid systems that can flexibly respond to changing pressures within this dynamic environment through no-regret investments that are robust across multiple, possible future scenarios.