Dr Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO of Siemens Grid Software, stepped onto the stage at IFS Industrial X Unleashed with a warning: “Today, I’d say the grids are at risk of becoming the bottleneck of the AI revolution,” she told the audience.
Electricity demand is now expected to increase by about 50% by 2030; half of that was already on the horizon from the electrification of transport, heating and the wider energy transition, and AI data centers are now adding an enormous new layer of demand on top.
Erlinghagen described these hyperscale facilities as “AI factories,” each capable of consuming as much power as the entire economy of Japan.
A 2.6-terawatt traffic jam
Erlinghagen told the audience there is already a 2.6-terawatt queue for new generation connections in the United States, with roughly 95% of it renewable. Connection times, she added, have stretched from two or three years to an average of five.
“If you tell Microsoft or any AI company to wait five years for a data-center connection,” she warned, “the AI revolution will slow down dramatically.”
The integrated answer
At the same event, IFS and Siemens formally announced a strategic partnership. The combination unites Siemens Gridscale X planning, simulation and operational-intelligence tools with IFS’s AI-powered enterprise asset management, field-service scheduling and Copperleaf asset-investment planning suite.
Available now as a cloud-ready, modular offering inside the Siemens Xcelerator marketplace, the platform gives utilities end-to-end visibility from multi-decade capital allocation to tomorrow morning’s crew dispatch.
Max Roberts, Chief Operating Officer of IFS, called it “the autonomous grid” made real today. “By combining Siemens’ unmatched grid intelligence with IFS’s Industrial AI platform, we’re enabling utilities to make smarter investment decisions, predict and prevent asset failures, and orchestrate field operations with unprecedented precision.”
The $5.2 billion Canadian proof point
Erlingham shared an example of an unnamed Canadian utility with about $5.2 billion in annual capital expenditure that had long used Siemens models for the technically optimal plan and IFS Copperleaf for the financially optimal plan.
When the teams co-simulated both datasets, she explained, they discovered a third scenario that outperformed either standalone recommendation on both technical risk and return on investment.
Timothy Swanson, retired CIO/CSO of FortisBC and now an industry advisor, said the integration is exactly what the sector has been missing: “We can’t meet these challenges with yesterday’s tools.”
Resilience when the lights go out
Erlinghagen told the audience that in the past year alone, the cost of power outages in the United States has increased by 175%, reaching an estimated $150 billion in economic losses. By fusing Siemens’ real-time equipment monitoring with IFS dynamic work management and scheduling, she said, utilities can now detect incipient failures and redirect crews before blackouts cascade.
Humans in the loop, AI at the wheel
“It’s impossible for humans alone to manage optimally,” Erlinghagen stressed to the room. Decentralized renewables, rooftop solar and gigawatt-scale data centers have made the grid too complex for manual optimization 24/7.
The partnership’s vision, she explained, is autonomous grid management that uses AI to plan, operate and maintain more efficiently, while keeping humans firmly in the loop for critical decisions.
The final call
Erlinghagen closed with two sentences aimed straight at every utility CEO in the room:
“We must collaborate. The challenge is too great for any one organization.” And: “We must move faster. The energy and utility sector has traditionally moved at a steady pace, but the world is changing faster than ever.”
