Digitalization and AI in the fight for energy resilience
Global energy infrastructure is always in constant transition due to endlessly shifting variables and the rise of new technologies. To help understand the current state of the infrastructure transition and guide future decisions, Siemens has released its Infrastructure Transition Monitor (ITM) for 2025, based on a global survey of 1,400 executives with supplemental in-depth interviews with experts. The report delves into the evolution of energy infrastructure and the industrial sector’s progress toward sustainability.
There are multiple takeaways from the report, though a couple stand out prominently compared to the last report in 2023. According to ITM 2025, the energy transition is being driven more and more by the need for energy resilience and security, in addition to decarbonization. While the report acknowledges the challenges involved with such goals, it also reflects how digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly being seen as solutions, enabling data traceability, collaboration and even autonomous grids.
Securing the energy supply becomes the priority
In contrast to the modest gain in country-level infrastructure transition goals reported in the 2023 survey, ITM 2025 reports significant progress. Despite the slowing of advancement in areas such as the decarbonization of heavy industry and biodiversity/ecosystem protection, the number of respondents reporting maturity and advancement in most other cases has nearly doubled. This falls in line with reports from the International Energy Agency (IEA). According to the organization, investments in clean energy have increased from $1.9 trillion in 2023 to $2.2 trillion in 2025, whereas fossil fuel investments have decreased from $1.2 trillion to $1.1 trillion.
A wide variety of factors can be contributed to these increases, but one notable factor highlighted by the report is the desire for energy resilience. Especially during times of geopolitical uncertainty, ensuring an independent, resilient energy supply becomes ever more important. ITM 2025 reflects this shift. In 2023, energy resilience was ranked third out of a list of top priorities for the next three years. Now it is ranked first.
Connecting grids with digitalization
Whether to increase resiliency or accelerate decarbonization, any transition in energy infrastructure will require stable grids as a foundation. Demands for electricity have been changing significantly in recent years, and new transmission and distribution systems will be needed to handle those demands. The problem is how many distribution grids lack visibility. Behind-the-meter energy assets such as solar panels and electric vehicles prevent grid operators from monitoring data, preventing them from efficiently managing the flow of energy.
According to ITM 2025, the integration of software and digital technology are solutions to this issue. Utilities, for example, can utilize smart meter data to build a digital twin of the grid, effectively creating a virtual representation of the real thing, to predict energy flow and identify potential risks. This helps enhance data visibility for all stakeholders, and when combined with emerging market policies that value flexibility mechanisms, the digital twin and associated technologies can help maximize grid outputs.
Respondents of the survey seem to agree, with 74 percent believing software and smart grids are key to the energy transition.
Building autonomous grids
Another point of consensus found among respondents is how AI is expected to transform energy infrastructure in the coming years, with 72 percent stating it will change how their organizations operate. This may not come as a surprise to some. Between brand new technologies and growing numbers of variables such as hazardous weather, the complexity of today’s energy systems is outpacing many human operators’ capabilities.
AI not only has the potential to manage the sheer amounts of data that come with all these variables, but it can implement autonomous functions to grids. Local deployments already exist where software can respond to real-time inputs from distributed generation and can enact reconfiguration, resource optimization and even self-healing if needed. Humans will still be involved, approving such measures before they’re enacted, but such autonomous systems are still expected to bring about lower costs and increased energy efficiency and reliability.
There are still plenty of obstacles to overcome to implement these technologies. Much of existing infrastructure lacks the interoperability necessary to carry out these exchanges of data. Yet where there is a will, there is a way, and if the ITM 2025 report is anything to go by, organizations are more than willing to utilize digitalization and AI to accelerate the infrastructure transition and make energy more resilient and secure.
Learn more about the infrastructure transition by downloading the ITM 2025 report, which also includes specific case studies and interviews from industry experts.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
