Michael Chua
PowerShift Contributor
First Published Q4 2025
“Not much changed in how we generated and delivered energy over the last hundred years, and then in the last ten years, everything changed.”
The Pace of Change is Outrunning The Classic Playbook
If you’d fallen into a coma a decade ago and woken up today, you might not recognize the energy world you once knew. Artificial intelligence drives demand almost as fast as it analyzes it. Data centers, electric vehicles, distributed solar, and storage systems are redrawing the grid’s contours; meanwhile, the energy transition, once a distant target, now becomes a daily operational challenge.
“Not much changed in how we generated and delivered energy over the last hundred years,” says Chris Black, CEO of GridX. “And then in the last ten years, everything changed.”
That “everything” has created both the most significant growth opportunity and the greatest coordination challenge the industry has ever faced. Growth means more than adding megawatts; it means building the muscle to adapt, learn, and share… together.
“Every single decision-maker at utilities needs to be part of this conversation,” Black emphasises. “Creating different outlets for this discussion is really important, because the pace of change is so fast that nobody can afford to sit it out.”
The Hidden Power of Shared Understanding
The utilities sector prizes stability and caution: keep the lights on, stay out of headlines. But Black argues that in today’s environment, caution, if left unchecked to the point of trepidation, can obstruct growth, and only those companies that collaborate to address the swiftly shifting tides of global change will keep ahead of the curve.
“Utilities all talk, and they compare notes,” he asserts. “And that’s a good thing, because there’s so much to learn from one another. We need more of that, not less. For example, once enough utilities find a good platform, the next utilities in the door tend to move together more assuredly; their friends are there, which signals that the provider possesses the bonafides and truly understands their world.” This collective progression or shared momentum accelerates the industry towards a future where innovation compounds rather than competes.
Rather than simply a cultural nicety, that instinct for group learning becomes an economic necessity. Electricity demand, once flat or declining, has suddenly spiked, driven by electrification and AI. “We’re literally at a point where there’s a real danger of not enough electrons to go around,” Black warns.
The new industry paradigm relentlessly presses utilities to simultaneously expand capacity, hone grid-wide efficiency, and decarbonize. However, building new generating capacity takes many years. The magic key, Black uncovers, resides in better managing demand, which works on a much more immediate timeline.
Companies like GridX give utilities a finer instrument for shaping how and when energy flows. “If you think about what a rate is,” Black explains, “it’s the shape of a curve defined by a price signal whose whole purpose is to change behavior.”
Well-designed rates nudge load off-peak, align consumption with renewable generation, and create feedback loops where customers save money, while the grid breathes easier.
“In one instance, Southern California Edison’s residential TOU program measured 75 MW of load reduction during a peak event in August 2022. In their demand response lineup, that was equivalent to their third largest program at that time,” Black states excitedly as an example. “That’s such a massive impact. It’s good for people, and it’s good for the grid.”
But this only works when knowledge flows freely across teams, utilities, and the industry as a whole. “We can’t just solve our piece of the puzzle. We have to see the whole picture.”
Why Demand Beats Supply
The focus on demand rather than supply comes down to timelines. “To build a new plant post the 1900’s, that can be up to a 15-year cycle,” Black exclaims. “This is a dire need right now, and we don’t really have that time.”
Even data centers, which have seemingly endless demand, harbor flexibility. “There’s a lot of movable load inside a data center,” Black notes. “If data centers were just a little bit more aware of a price signal, that’s a massive amount of load you can move around.”
And while political winds may shift against renewables temporarily, Black trusts the long-term trajectory. “The economics around renewables are already cheaper than everything else for the first time in history. The economics will win.”
He points to Texas as proof: “Texas couldn’t be more red, right? Yet it’s the largest wind producer by a mile and the second largest solar producer in the country. Economics always wins.”
Building Cultures That Learn Faster
For all the talk about technology, according to Chris Black, culture might wield the most powerful lever for growth. “You have to create a culture where people feel welcomed and encouraged to share what they know,” Black says. “That’s where all the goodness comes out: it makes people more dedicated, increasingly innovative, and harder working.”
Inside GridX, that culture manifests in rituals of openness: hackathons, “brunch-and-learns,” and demo sessions where teams present breakthroughs to peers. “We just did one where Nick and Dylan demonstrated how careful use of AI coding environments might someday do in moments what used to take literal months or entire sprints, along with generating all the testing apparati and documentation to ensure the results match exactly what we expect,” he marvels.
But the more profound lesson transcends AI or code. It centers on turning discovery into dialogue. “Every time someone learns something new, they have an obligation to teach it forward,” Black proclaims. “Knowledge sharing isn’t me standing up and telling everyone what to do. It’s everyone bringing their ideas to the table.”
This mindset matters especially now, given the generational shift sweeping through utilities. “It wasn’t that long ago that for the vast majority of people inside a utility, they’d never worked outside the utility,” Black says. “That has fundamentally changed now.”
Veteran engineers carry decades of tacit knowledge. Younger hires arrive fluent in data analytics but less versed in regulatory nuance or grid physics. Conversation bridges that gap.
Black’s advice to leaders: build spaces where those worlds meet. “Being flexible and embracing change is so important right now, because the pace of change is growing every single day.”
Responsible Growth Leaves No One Behind
When asked what “responsible growth” means, Black doesn’t hesitate: “Making sure people aren’t left behind and that growth doesn’t benefit some at the expense of others.”
Advanced rate design, he believes, can make energy costs more equitable. “Regulators used to worry about time-of-use rates with low- and middle-income earners. They would ask questions like, ‘Do they have the flexibility in their daily lives to respond to a price signal?’ We now know that yes, they do. They actually respond more than anybody else, and the percentage of savings they realize is more meaningful than for anybody else.”
Equity, in this context, isn’t a slogan. It’s an engineering target. Achieving it requires data and empathy: listening to how customers experience energy, not just how they consume it.
That same listening applies internally. Black dismisses those who treat diversity and inclusion as political distractions. “If you strip out the political toxicity that’s made DEI a dirty word, you’re left with three ideas nobody should oppose: diversity, equity, and inclusion,” he explains. “There’s a bottomless amount of data showing that the more diverse the team, the more productive the team. There’s literally nothing bad that can come from increasing any of those three things.”
The theme stays consistent: sharing knowledge, whether between departments, demographics, or disciplines, powers better decisions.
From Insight to Action
What does this mean for utility decision-makers? First, don’t wait for clarity. The technologies, data, and insights that could make your operations cleaner, cheaper, and more resilient already exist across the industry. Surface them, test them, and scale them through dialogue.
Second, abandon the solo climb. The old model of isolated pilot projects and proprietary silos can’t match the pace of today’s electrification wave. “We’re all in this together,” Black says. “The more we talk, the faster we learn. And the faster we learn, the faster we can build the grid we need.”
Third, treat culture as a strategy. The most sophisticated digital transformation will stall without a culture that rewards curiosity and transparency. As Black put it: “I want everybody to feel like it’s all of our responsibility to make this place better every single day.”
Finally, recognize that conversation itself forms part of the infrastructure. Just as physical grids transmit power, conversational grids transmit insight. Every forum – conferences, podcasts, roundtables, internal meetings – serves as a substation of ideas.
That’s why platforms like this magazine matter to Chris Black. “It certainly is a bit self-serving for GridX, getting our name in front of more utility decision-makers,” he admitted. “But what’s even more important to me is that we just facilitate the conversation. We need to leverage every outlet we have, because there’s simply so much conversation to be had right now.”
Looking Ahead
We no longer measure growth only in gigawatts or customer counts. We measure it in adaptability: in how fast we learn and how well we share. The utilities that will thrive over the next decade will see every conversation as a current worth amplifying.
The grid of the future won’t only be a handful of large, interconnected networks stretching across the continent. As Black envisions, “it will also allow for every home, every business to be an island unto themselves – generating their own energy, storing their own energy, and using their own energy whenever they need it.” The technology nearly exists: solar panels, improving battery chemistry, and economics drive rapid R&D investment, thanks in many ways to the advent and proliferation of electric vehicles.
But even in a decentralized world, one thing must stay connected: knowledge. When utilities share what they know, they don’t just grow; they lead.
“We no longer measure growth only in gigawatts or customer counts. We measure it in adaptability: in how fast we learn and how well we share. The utilities that will thrive over the next decade will see every conversation as a current worth amplifying.”
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