September 24, 2025 – InnovationForce, the leader in affordably democratizing innovation with AI, today announced the release of its report Beyond the Gridlock, a first-of-its-kind, interactive playbook that identifies the top ten most pressing challenges utilities must solve to affordably modernize the electric grid.

The report draws on analysis of more than 60 publicly available utility regulatory and grid modernization plans and nearly 6,000 challenges surfaced by InnovationWorks AI. From these, InnovationForce identified the ten most frequently cited and pressing challenges shaping the industry’s future. 

“This report highlights the work in front of us to modernize the grid,” said Dr. Elizabeth Cook, Vice President, Technical Strategy at the Association for Edison Illuminating Companies. “The technology to solve the key challenges exist. The hard part is not finding the solutions. It will be the ability to balance affordability with innovation and modernization to usher in the future.”

The challenges fall into the following categories:

• Resilient Grid
• Grid constraints 
• Flexible Grid
• Workforce of the Future

The report comes at a critical moment as utilities face unprecedented pressures from explosive AI datacenter demand, electrification, extreme weather and aging infrastructure.

“Next to the electric grid itself, artificial intelligence may be the most powerful technology humanity has ever created. But it can only be as strong as the grid that powers it,” said Kimberly Getgen, CEO and Founder of InnovationForce. “This report cuts through the noise, prioritizing the top challenges utilities face to create a North Star leaders can follow to drive affordable transformation. Each challenge is mapped directly to technology stack of commercially available solutions that can accelerate modernization more affordably than the typical ‘business as usual’ options.”

Key Findings:

• Utilities are navigating the “trifecta” of challenges: maintaining yesterday’s aging infrastructure, meeting today’s climate resilience and reliability expectations, and investing in tomorrow’s digital and clean energy technologies.
• The report identifies 10 high-leverage challenges—from wildfire resilience and capacity bottlenecks to flexible load forecasting and workforce transformation—that represent the most urgent barriers to affordability.
• Each challenge is linked to a structured technology stack framework, offering utilities commercially ready, cost-saving solutions to deploy now.

Unlike traditional static reports, Beyond the Gridlock is fully interactive, leveraging InnovationForce’s InnovationWorks platform to map challenges to real-world solutions and drive industry collaboration. Each report offers a free InnovationWorks account so utilities and stakeholders can immediately explore validated solution options, benchmark against peers, and collaborate across the industry.

“The next $1 trillion in grid investment is coming from utilities but there is also significant new investment coming from tech companies investing in their own generation stacks,” added Getgen. “How the utility industry responds will determine the future. Like a century ago, those who innovated the most efficiently, those that collaborated and shared learnings, influenced a great century of growth. The rest fell behind. It’s no different today. If we work together, we can be more successful and move more efficiently faster.” 

Download the full report here. Continue the conversation with our companion podcast series, Piloting the Future, available on the Energy Central feed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.