By Tim Wolf
Tucked away in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains just a mile up the road from Snowbird, the venue for GridFWD 2026, is Alta, a slope with a distinct, nostalgic vibe that belies the short distance separating the two ski destinations. In the late 19th century, Alta was a booming silver mine and settlement. But frequent avalanches were destroying the buildings, mining infrastructure and killing dozens of miners.
In response to this continuing threat Alta innovated, evolved and eventually transformed. Alta pioneered avalanche research and safety practices, eventually pivoting the business from mining to skiing in the late 1930s.
Alta’s transformation seems a fitting exemplum for the focus of GridFWD 2026: “Reprioritizing Affordability for Modernizing the Grid.” The event dug into solutions to current energy cost challenges by pursuing investments in the power grid that create demand flexibility, improve utilization of current assets and empower consumers to control costs. And the industry must do these things while also building consensus for broader structural, regulatory and business model reforms that will support long-term affordability.
“How do we boil this ocean?” GridFWD Executive Director and CEO Bryce Yonker asked in a rhetorical nod to the enormity of the task during the opening plenary session, which brought together more than 450 industry leaders from the US and Canada representing utilities, technology companies, regulators, policymakers and consumer advocates. He also observed that “if the next three or four years are like the last three or four years, our industry is going to have a big problem.”
Attendees at GridFWD 2026 weighed in on why “reprioritizing affordability” was so important for grid modernization.
Electricity Costs Outpace Inflation
That problem, of course, is spiraling electricity prices. And it’s a challenge that is more nuanced than inflation-driven price increases for commodities such as gasoline or beef. The price of electricity is bound to a heavily regulated, capital-intensive industry and a real-time physical delivery network that incurs both fixed and variable costs. Power must be generated, balanced, and delivered instantly across physical wires without ubiquitous, long-duration storage available yet. In other words, the price of electricity is not a linear function of supply and demand.
As Peter Cappers, staff scientist and strategic advisor at the Lawrence-Berkeley Lab pointed out in an early session focused on the drivers of cost increases, electricity price increases, going back to 2019, have largely tracked with inflation. However, over the last year or two, electricity prices have outpaced inflation. What’s driving these more recent cost increases?
“The vast majority is driven by transmission and distribution system expenditures over the long term,” Cappers said. “It’s not necessarily driven by load growth. It’s driven by assets that need to get replaced. We didn’t have to pay for them for a while and now we do. We’re also seeing assets that are coming online that are addressing issues like reliability and resilience, and grid hardening.”
Technology to Control Costs
The GridFWD 2026 Innovation Pavilion and vendor kiosks offered an array of market-ready solutions to mitigate the cost challenge through peak load management, asset utilization optimization and the creation of customer agency. These included AI-supported analytics to detect and analyze everything from voltage sags to transformer overloading to wildfires.
There are also grid-enhancing technologies such as dynamic line rating, advanced power flow control and new conductor technology to pull more energy through transmission lines. Advanced orchestration tools enable the creation of VPPs to aggregate DERs while also engaging customers with technology or programmatic solutions to combat the rise of monthly electricity bills.
Strategic investments in these technologies and programs would likely put a dent in the electricity cost spiral in the near term. But the bigger question lingering over the technology sessions is whether the regulatory environment and incentives can be aligned to support strategic grid investments and innovation that are needed quickly.
In one session focused on aligning regulatory incentives for digital infrastructure, panelists agreed that traditional long-life grid assets have a distinct advantage over software and digital solutions in the current regulatory regime. In other words, there’s remains a strong capital bias for steel and concrete assets that are depreciated over decades.
“I think across the board you can make the statement that software cannot compete against steel,” said Luigi Montana, CEO of envelio, an energy software company helping electric utilities modernize grid planning, interconnection, and operations through digitalization. These companies that deliver digital, AI and software solutions to grid cost challenges are looking for a level playing field.
“The goal is not to make the non-capital expenditures, specifically software win,” said Anupam Gehani, energy transition lead for Accenture. “It is to ensure that all the options, whether it’s physical, digital or the flexible options, such as non-wires alternatives, are compared on the same evidence of reliability, affordability and customer value.”
Process Innovation
Other speakers focused on better ways of doing things, especially planning and interconnection processes. One area of opportunity is broader use of integrated grid planning. As the electric grid becomes more complex, planning transmission, distribution, generation, and DERs as separate domains is increasingly untenable. Growth in renewable generation, battery energy storage systems, electric vehicles, demand response and electrification is creating new impacts and interdependencies spanning the entire grid that require more coordinated investment decisions.
“From a regulatory perspective, the goal of integrated planning is to optimize the grid efficiently to deliver maximum value to consumers,” said Heide Caswell, administrator for the Oregon Public Utilities Commission. About 20 U.S. states, including Oregon, have formally adopted or begun requiring regulated electric utilities to submit integrated local distribution or grid planning filing, according to research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Flexible interconnection is another approach to grid management that decreases costs and “time- to-power” for new assets, especially renewables. Data center and clean energy developers are rapidly filling high-voltage and distribution-level interconnection queues. In response to the interconnection deluge, utilities and grid operators are more frequently using flexible interconnection as a tool to dynamically adjust how and when energy resources or large loads connect to the grid based on real-time conditions rather than treating every connection as a fixed, permanent capacity commitment.
Christopher Lynn, advisor for large load strategy for APS in Arizona, said APS uses flexible interconnection agreements to avoid buying high-cost capacity products on the spot market, which protects all ratepayers from holding cost significant risks. Carrie Simpson, vice president of markets for Southwest Power Pool (SPP) said her organization has recently approved flexible interconnection pathway requests for large loads totaling 15 GW.
Simpson said flexible interconnection allows developers to interconnect quickly while also agreeing to curtailment to preserve grid reliability. Flexible interconnection can also defer or avoid expensive, time-consuming physical line and transformer rebuilds by utilizing existing wire capacity during off-peak or normal hours.
Risk of Failure is the Price of Learning
With all these innovative ideas circulating to relieve upward cost pressures, can utilities and their regulators nurture an environment conducive to continuous innovation? That would point to a market and regulatory milieu that has room for unconventional ideas, opportunities to challenge the status quo, and, when necessary, the ability to take a constructive view of failure where mistakes are treated as valuable data and learning opportunities rather than setbacks.
“There’s a questionable tolerance for failure in regulation,” said Richard Sedano, former commissioner with the Vermont Department of Public Service and senior leader at the Regulator Assistance Project who moderated the cost drivers panel discussion. “And I think one of the challenges for regulators is how do we experiment successfully while accommodating for the possibility that some great ideas will not work and it’s better that we know that and move on than arguing about it and never moving anywhere.”
Indeed, the firehose of new technologies that solve problems and create opportunities will only accelerate. The innovative energy to control costs was evident in the teams who shared their solutions in the Innovation Pavillion and the Grid Innovation Pitch Competition. From automated “drones in a box” to AI-enabled DER orchestration, GridFWD 2026 exuded innovation.
Pila Energy, which offers a plug-and-play, battery storage solution consisting of slim, briefcase-sized units that plug into standard 120V outlets to create an expandable wireless mesh network, providing automatic, distributed backup power, bill optimization and demand flexibility, was selected by the juried panel of judges as the winner in the Pitch Competition.
CRWN AI, a company that builds pole-mounted, autonomous IoT acoustic and RF sensors to predict high-voltage transmission line failures before they cause blackouts or wildfires, won the People Choice Award in the Pitch Competition, receiving the most votes from GridFWD 2026 attendees.
Yet beyond all the technological advancement, getting the regulatory construct right to allocate costs and benefits equitably and align incentives — what speakers repeatedly referred to as “harmonization” — during a period of significant load growth and technology disruption is the key challenge industry and regulators face. And, as many experts reminded us, those changes will take time and a lot of consensus building.
GridFWD 2026 brought together an exceptional cross section of industry thought leaders and innovators to grapple with the very challenging and complex topic of electricity affordability and grid modernization. Can Alta’s historic model of innovation followed by transformation apply to grid modernization and the affordability challenge consumers and businesses are experiencing right now?
Several speakers struck cautiously optimistic tones that the combination of continued renewables deployment, energy efficiency and demand side management improvements, fair-share rates for data centers, increased standardization of grid equipment and other steps could bring some needed relief to consumers in the next couple of years.
We’ll have to keep an eye on our electricity bills so we can compare notes (and numbers) next year when GridFWD 2027 convenes next October in Tucson, Arizona around the focus of “Speed to Action.”
Tim Wolf is the founder and principal of Wolf Narrative LLC, specializing in storytelling, copywriting and content marketing for leaders of the energy transition. You can reach him tim@wolfnarrative.com.
