Your Energy Strategy Is Stuck in 2019. Here Is How to Know — and What to Do About It
Key Takeaways
- Organizations must integrate compute growth forecasts with power procurement and perform energy availability analysis before facility expansion.
- US energy storage capacity surged 32% to 37.4 GW in 2025, with an additional 187 GW in the pipeline to meet contracted clean power demand.
- Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) and rapidly falling battery costs provide a compelling alternative to expensive nuclear and gas peakers.
- Transitioning to clean, contracted, locally-sourced power insulates organizations from fossil fuel price volatility and grid constraint delays.
Here is a simple diagnostic for your organisation's energy strategy. Answer these three questions honestly.
First: does your energy procurement team talk to your AI or technology infrastructure team? Not occasionally. Regularly. As part of a shared planning process that integrates compute growth projections with power requirement forecasts.
Second: does your capital planning process include a power availability analysis before committing to new facilities, new data centre capacity, or new manufacturing expansion?
Third: has your board been briefed in the last twelve months on the energy security implications of your operational geography — specifically, which of your critical facilities are in markets where grid capacity is constrained, where utility timelines are extending, or where the regulatory environment for new power connections is deteriorating?
If the answer to any of those three questions is no, your energy strategy is stuck in 2019. And the cost of that lag is growing every quarter.
The Scale of the Storage Shift
By October 2025, US operating storage capacity reached 37.4 GW, up 32% year to date. Another 19 GW is under construction through 2026, with a 187 GW pipeline. The organisations building that pipeline are not doing so speculatively. They are responding to contracted demand from organisations that have already done the analysis your team has not yet done — and locked in the clean power supply that will define their cost structure and operational resilience for the next decade.
Long Duration Energy Storage backed 16 projects totalling 7.6 GW in the UK, nearly tripling Britain's storable electricity. With battery costs falling fast and nuclear growing costlier and more delayed in some markets, there is a strong case for even more energy storage using a wider range of emerging technologies. The policy environment is moving — sometimes faster than most corporate energy teams can track — and the organisations that are not monitoring it are discovering, too late, that the assumptions their long-term contracts were built on have changed.
The Operational Playbook
The practical steps are not complicated:
1. **Map your energy exposure:** Analyse facility by facility, market by market, and generation source by generation source. 2. **Identify concentration risks:** Pinpoint facilities that depend on a single utility, a single fuel type, or a single grid connection. 3. **Build a diversification roadmap:** Align your strategy with where the energy system is going over the next ten years, not where it has been. 4. **Appoint executive leadership:** Put someone in a leadership position who owns the intersection of energy strategy and infrastructure planning — as a core operational and capital allocation responsibility.
BloombergNEF finds that countries reliant on imported fossil fuels can materially reduce exposure to price shocks as electrification and clean power scale. The same logic applies to organisations. The ones that have diversified their energy supply toward clean, contracted, locally-sourced power are carrying less exposure to the geopolitical volatility, the grid constraint delays, and the price shocks that are increasingly the defining features of the conventional energy system.
Your energy strategy is either a competitive advantage or a liability. There is very little middle ground left.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the key signs that an energy strategy is outdated?
If procurement doesn't coordinate with tech infrastructure, if capital expansion omits grid power availability checks, or if boards aren't briefed on regional grid constraints, the strategy is outdated.
Why is energy storage capacity expanding so rapidly?
Storage capacity is growing to meet contracted demand from corporate hyperscalers locking in 24/7 clean power and mitigating intermittent renewable power risks.
How does clean energy diversification reduce corporate financial risk?
Contracted, locally-sourced clean power shields companies from fossil fuel price shocks, geopolitical supply disruptions, and long utility connection delays.
