Maintenance Mindset: Maintenance strategies to survive the industrial power apocalypse

Key highlights

• Rising global electricity demand, aging infrastructure, and extreme weather events are creating serious risks for power reliability in manufacturing environments.
• Proactive maintenance and predictive analytics are essential tools for identifying vulnerabilities and preventing power disruptions before they impact operations.
• Technologies like microgrids and smart grid integration offer practical strategies to improve energy resilience and maintain uptime during grid instability.

Welcome to Maintenance Mindset, our editors’ takes on things going on in the worlds of manufacturing and asset management that deserve some extra attention. This will appear regularly in the Member’s Only section of the site.

The apocalypse may not come in the form of disease or war. It could come in a form of ruin that many may not be thinking about—power scarcity.

Perhaps ‘apocalypse’ is painting an exaggerated picture. However, it is definitely a possibility, if we don’t take note as a worldwide population of the imbalance created by increasing electricity demand outpacing infrastructure capacity.

Rising power demand and heat stress are straining industrial energy infrastructure

I recently attended the Honeywell Users Group Americas conference in San Antonio in early June, as part of a team of Endeavor editors writing stories for daily enewsletter coverage about the show. One of the presentations I covered addressed power scarcity, given by Prudence Hoffman, portfolio director of Honeywell Integrated Climate Solutions, and she presented some scary statistics.

Here are some to keep you up at night:

• Global electricity demand increased by 4% in 2024, marking a pivotal moment as the globe surpassed 30,000 terawatt hours (TWh) of demand for the first time, largely attributed to extreme heat waves.
• From 2023 to 2050, electricity usage related to electrification could more than double or even triple in faster energy transition scenarios.
• By 2050, data centers alone could require 2,500 to 4,500 TWh of global electricity, or 5 to 9% of total global demand.
• AI is projected to generate $10 to $15 trillion in annual economic value globally, but achieving even a quarter of this economic value by the end of the decade would require an additional 50 to 75 gigawatts (GW) of data center infrastructure worldwide.
• Globally, emissions in the power sector are at a record high, increasing by 1.6% in 2024 compared to the previous year.

It’s a perfect storm of complications. We have increasing global expansion of economies, particularly in new and emerging markets; increasing weather events leading to higher power usage; the global trend toward increased electrification; and advanced technologies, like AI-driven data centers, which are very power hungry. Even cloud computing and cryptocurrency are also contributing to increased power demand.

Utilities are doubly challenged with aging infrastructure to support power transmission. A large percentage of U.S. transformers, circuit breakers, and transmission lines are exceeding 25 years old. Demand for transformer capacity is expected to surge dramatically by 2050 but also be complicated by supply chain disruptions.

In part, the answer for these issues, Hoffman argues, is sustainable, clean power—about which she revealed some bright spots:

• Clean power now makes up around just under 41% of the global energy mix.
• In 2024, renewable power sources were set to add a record 858 TWh, up by 49% from 2022.
• Emission intensity has also fallen by 15% since a peak in 2007, and clean energy investments since 2015 have jumped by 60%.

The challenge will be integrating low carbon power into the existing grid, as renewable power sources often present issues with stability. Advances in energy storage and smart grids will be needed to transition the grid to the future, and microgrids will also play a big role in making the electrical grid more flexible and efficient, and keeping individual organizations connected but separate from the grid, if need be.

Microgrids are gaining popularity, growing 11% from 2018 to 2022, and many energy operators and consumers use microgrids or advanced power management to improve energy resilience. During disruptions, microgrids provide localized control and power stability. During extreme weather events, microgrids are a liberator.

Proactive maintenance strategies mitigate power disruptions in industrial operations

Even if we nail all the needed advancements, Hoffman advises industry to have a plan for disruptions to the grid or long-term impacts from power scarcity. She also has a current solution for industrial power users to avoid power disruption: proactive maintenance.

“It’s crucial to take proactive measures to minimize these disruptions,” says Hoffman. “To deal with power transmitting events, we need solutions that can predict, prevent and reduce their efforts. Tools like performance manager predictive analytics are great for spotting issues early and forecasting power and stability.”

Last summer, I first wrote about some of the grid problems and the U.S. Department of Energy’s hope that AI-enhanced predictive maintenance can help grid infrastructure. 
While utility companies need to replace aging infrastructure, global demand may double or triple by 2050, so proactive maintenance has to be a part of the solution. It can bridge the gap between aging infrastructure, as new is built, and efficiency will be key to growing a grid large enough to handle all our future power demands. For anyone wondering about the irony of using power hungry AI to improve the country's power grid system, you're an inquiring skeptic after my own heart.

The real wild card here is climate change. Energy demands are largely driven by weather events. Heat waves drive up energy usage, and storms can wipe out infrastructure. How is AI and all that data going to help anyone without power? This is not a definite doomsday scenario in the perfect storm of power supply and demand, but at the current rate, we need investment or decreased power usage.

Imagine a world without power. How long could anything we recognize survive?