The electric power industry is confronting a challenge that becomes clearer by the month: electricity demand is growing rapidly, while the infrastructure required to serve that demand cannot always be expanded at the same pace. Data centers and artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, transportation electrification, building electrification, and industrial growth are changing electricity demand across the United States. Meeting that challenge will require more generation and more transmission, but it will also require utilities to make substantially better use of the resources and infrastructure already connected to the grid.
That is why the GridWise Alliance's August 2026 report, Distribution Investments to Meet Rising Electricity Demand: Technologies to Harness Distribution-Level Resources and Enable Grid Flexibility, deserves attention. The report offers a thoughtful examination of how distribution-level resources can become a meaningful part of the solution, but its larger message may be even more important: meeting rising electricity demand requires a coordinated strategy across transmission, distribution, and local resources rather than choosing among them.
The GridWise Alliance and the many organizations and individuals who contributed to this work deserve recognition. Contributors include representatives from Beam Reach Consulting Group, Landis+Gyr, Tennessee Valley Authority, Black & Veatch, Anterix, Guidehouse, Bandera Electric Cooperative, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Itron, and GE Vernova. That breadth of participation is itself a useful reminder that grid modernization will require collaboration among utilities, technology providers, researchers, regulators, policymakers, customers, and many others.
Moving Beyond Either/Or
One of the strongest statements in the report appears near the beginning. GridWise argues that meeting growing electricity demand is not a choice between expanding transmission and harnessing local resources. We need both. Transmission expansion is necessary and must accelerate, while distribution systems and customer-sited resources can provide faster and more flexible solutions as new generation and transmission infrastructure is developed.
That is an important distinction because discussions about grid modernization are still sometimes framed around competing solutions. Should we build new transmission or increase the capability of existing corridors? Should we add generation or better manage demand? Should utilities invest in centralized infrastructure or distributed resources?
Considering the magnitude of the challenge ahead, those increasingly seem like the wrong questions. We need additional infrastructure, but we also need to make existing infrastructure work harder and more efficiently. We need additional generation, but we also need flexibility. We need distributed resources, but we need the communications, sensing, software, forecasting, and controls necessary to make those resources useful to grid operators.
In other words, we need an integrated grid.
Demand Growth Changes the Equation
GridWise also makes an important observation about what is now driving investment. FERC Order 2222 created an important framework for aggregated distributed energy resources to participate in wholesale electricity markets. But the report argues that rapidly increasing electricity demand - not regulatory compliance alone - is now creating the economic and operational imperative for investment in DER technologies.
Data centers and AI infrastructure are creating large and often geographically concentrated loads. Transportation and building electrification are changing distribution load profiles. Industrial electrification and advanced manufacturing are adding demand in regions where infrastructure may already be constrained. At the same time, rooftop solar, batteries, electric vehicles, smart thermostats, and other customer-sited resources are proliferating throughout distribution systems.
The distribution system is therefore becoming both a source of new demand and a potential source of capacity and flexibility.
Unlocking that flexibility, however, requires technology. GridWise identifies Advanced Metering Infrastructure, smart inverters, DER submetering, voltage optimization, and advanced communications, along with DERMS, ADMS, Virtual Power Plants, GIS, analytics, advanced billing, forecasting, and integrated planning.
These technologies form an ecosystem. Communications provide information. Information improves visibility. Visibility enables analytics. Analytics supports forecasting. Forecasting improves planning. And better planning and control allow utilities to use existing resources more effectively.
Flexibility Is Capacity
One of the report's most interesting discussions concerns "flexibility" - the ability to adjust supply or demand in response to system conditions. GridWise considers flexibility across multiple time scales, from real-time responses supporting frequency and voltage conditions to day-ahead resource scheduling and long-term planning.
The potential is substantial. Citing research from Duke University's Nicholas Institute, GridWise notes that the existing U.S. power system could potentially accommodate between 76 and 126 GW of additional load across the 22 largest balancing authorities if those loads could be curtailed for only a very small percentage of their annual maximum uptime.
There is a broader principle here that applies throughout the electric system: when infrastructure is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to build, increasing the productivity of existing assets can have tremendous value.
The Same Principle Applies to Transmission
This distribution-focused discussion has a clear parallel on the transmission system.
Just as DERMS, VPPs, communications, analytics, and other technologies can unlock capability that already exists within the distribution system, advanced transmission technologies can help utilities obtain substantially more capability from existing transmission infrastructure.
Advanced conductors can increase the capacity of existing transmission corridors while reducing thermal sag and electrical losses. Other Grid Enhancing Technologies can improve situational awareness, optimize power flows, and provide operators with better information about actual system conditions. Increasingly sophisticated sensing and communications can also make physical infrastructure more observable and provide utilities with information that can improve operations and asset management.
These technologies should not be viewed as substitutes for building transmission.
They are complements to it.
GridWise makes essentially the same argument about DERs: local flexibility does not eliminate the need for transmission expansion, and transmission expansion does not eliminate the value of local flexibility.
We need both.
The Grid Doesn't Have Silos
Another particularly important section of the report concerns Advanced Integrated Planning. GridWise describes the need to integrate planning across distribution, transmission, and energy supply and calls for increasingly coordinated, data-driven, cross-functional processes.
This is becoming increasingly important as technologies provide benefits across traditional utility organizational boundaries. A transmission line does not know whether congestion belongs to planning, engineering, operations, asset management, or regulatory affairs. A distribution feeder does not recognize the organizational distinction between load forecasting and DER planning. The physical grid simply responds to physics.
Our planning and investment processes increasingly need to reflect that reality.
A technology that increases capacity may also reduce losses, improve reliability, defer other investments, accelerate interconnections, improve resilience, or provide better system information. Evaluating technologies based on their total system value rather than through the budget or responsibility of a single department can reveal benefits that conventional planning approaches may overlook.
Technology Alone Is Not Enough
GridWise also deserves credit for acknowledging that technology by itself will not create a modern grid. The report discusses market design, valuation, measurement and verification, interconnection rules, contracts, customer engagement, aggregator business models, and cybersecurity as necessary components of a functioning flexibility market.
The same lesson applies broadly to grid modernization. Technology must be accompanied by appropriate standards, engineering practices, regulatory structures, planning methods, workforce capabilities, manufacturing capacity, and business models. Innovation delivers value only when it can move from the laboratory and specification sheet into widespread, reliable deployment.
We Need All of It
Perhaps the most important takeaway from Distribution Investments to Meet Rising Electricity Demand is therefore not about any individual technology.
It is about abandoning the search for a single solution.
The electric system being asked to support AI, data centers, advanced manufacturing, transportation electrification, distributed generation, storage, and continued economic growth will require a portfolio of solutions. We will need additional generation, additional transmission, stronger distribution systems, distributed energy resources, storage, demand flexibility, advanced conductors, Grid Enhancing Technologies, communications, sensing, analytics, forecasting, and much more integrated planning.
Most importantly, we need to stop treating these resources as competing solutions.
The GridWise Alliance, its members, and the many experts and organizations that contributed to this report deserve recognition for advancing that conversation. Their work reinforces an increasingly important principle for our industry: the grid of the future will not be defined by one technology, one resource, or one segment of the electric system.
It will be defined by how effectively we make all of them work together.