The energy transition crossroads of reliability and sustainability now has a major traffic jam years in the making and years from fixing.

Utility-scale power generation capacity is losing ground to meet demand from the rising forces of data center growth, electric vehicles, industrial electrification and onshoring of manufacturing.

Sometimes all good things may work out in the end, but getting there will take some deep thinking and huge commitment of resources.

Many issues are coming to a head fast, but the first challenge mentioned here may be the deepest and most immediate. The data center industry’s runaway growth is necessitating the need for at least another 21 GW of energy to match construction of facilities coming online. Research by financial firm Goldman Sachs predicts that new load could be closer to 47 GW by 2030.

This is a critically big number. One GW (1,000 MW) is comparable to the average size of a conventional nuclear power plant. The commissioning of Georgia Power’s new reactors Vogtle 3 and 4 notwithstanding, the American grid power generation industry is not building 47 new utility-scale nuclear plants anytime soon, if ever.

he evolution of generative AI (gen AI) has opened the door to great opportunities across organizations, particularly regarding gen AI agents—AI-powered software entities that plan and perform tasks or aid humans by delivering specific services on their behalf. So far, adoption at scale across businesses has faced difficulties because of data quality, employee distrust, and cost of implementation. In addition, capabilities have raced ahead of leaders’ capacity to imagine how these agents could be used to transform work.

However, as gen AI technologies progress and the next-generation agents emerge, we expect more use cases to be unlocked, deployment costs to decrease, long-tail use cases to become economically viable, and more at-scale automation to take place across a wider range of enterprise processes, employee experiences, and customer interfaces. This evolution will demand investing in strong AI trust and risk management practices and policies as well as platforms for managing and monitoring agent-based systems.

In this interview, McKinsey Digital’s Barr Seitz speaks with senior partners Jorge Amar and Lari Hämäläinen and partner Nicolai von Bismarck to explore the evolution of gen AI agents and how companies can and should implement the technology, where the pools of value lie for the enterprise as a whole. They particularly explore what these developments mean for customer service. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

New Jersey-based developer Scale Microgrids is going to partner with British EV infrastructure firm EO Charging to build out charging stations to meet future demands of fleet electrification in the U.S.

The non-exclusive partnership agreement will utilize Scale’s ability to provide on-site power resources and microgrids to facilitate EO Charging’s stations, which are to be built across the country. Both companies are free to pursue similar partnerships with other companies in the sector.

In Europe, EO Charging has developed charging stations for many of London’s transit fleets. Those electric public buses have totaled more than 25 million miles in emission-free routes, according to the company.

“Fleet operators cite electricity supply as a major concern for their transition to EVs,” John Walsh, president of EO Charging, Americas, said in a statement. “By partnering with Scale, we’ll be able to offer our customers a complete fleet electrification solution that gets their vehicles charging sooner, at a lower cost and with unprecedented reliability.”

Scale will develop microgrid planning and control technologies to balance the power generation, storage and charging capabilities. The company also will lead work on the project financing side.

Desde la pandemia, los ataques cibernéticos se han multiplicado por más de dos. Históricamente, las pérdidas directas sufridas por las empresas como resultado de ataques cibernéticos han sido relativamente limitadas, pero algunas compañías han acusado mucho más el efecto de esos ataques. Por ejemplo, en 2017, la agencia estadounidense de calificación crediticia Equifax pagó más de USD 1.000 millones en multas tras un caso grave de vulneración de datos que afectó a más de 150 millones de consumidores.

Tal y como explicamos en un capítulo del Informe sobre la estabilidad financiera mundial de abril de 2024, el riesgo de sufrir pérdidas cuantiosas debido a los ataques cibernéticos está aumentando. Potencialmente, esas pérdidas podrían acarrear problemas de financiamiento a las empresas e incluso hacer peligrar su solvencia. La envergadura de estas cuantiosas pérdidas se ha multiplicado por más de cuatro desde 2017 hasta situarse en USD 2.500 millones, por no hablar de las pérdidas indirectas —por ejemplo, el perjuicio reputacional— y los montos dedicados a mejorar la seguridad, que son significativamente superiores a esa cifra.

El sector financiero se encuentra particularmente expuesto al riesgo cibernético. Las compañías financieras —en vista de la gran cantidad de datos sensibles y transacciones que manejan— suelen ser blanco de delincuentes cuyo objetivo es robar dinero o perturbar la actividad económica. Los ataques a compañías financieras suponen casi una quinta parte del total y, más concretamente, los bancos son las entidades más expuestas.

The appearance of the first computer worms was a watershed in the history of cybersecurity. Unlike traditional viruses, they could replicate themselves, spreading their digital larvae across networks without human assistance. From the primordial worms of the internet’s formative years, such as Morris in 1988, to the ransomware cryptoworm WannaCry nearly three decades later, this sneaky genus of malware has left a trail of destruction in its tracks.

Innovations in wormery often appear in tandem with new technologies. And so it has happened with the dawn of democratised AI. Named after its ground-breaking forebear, Morris II is a new worm that uses generative AI to clone itself.

An experiment by researchers from Intuit, Cornell Tech and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology recently enlisted Morris II to use so-called poison prompts to break the defences of GenAI-powered email assistants. Emails stuffed with these prompts caused the assistants to comply with their commands. 

The prompts compelled them to send spam to other recipients and exfiltrate personal data from their targets. They then cloned themselves to other AI assistant clients, which mounted similar attacks.

The Roosevelt Project at MIT envisions a decarbonized world that doesn’t leave anyone behind.

Initiated and led by former US Secretary of Energy Ernest J. Moniz, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems emeritus, the initiative engages local and national decision-makers in conversations on what a socially just post-carbon economy might look like. This is “not only the right thing to do, but essential to minimize political headwinds to make progress on the climate process,” Moniz says.

“Our mission is to understand how the country could decarbonize while boosting economic opportunities for at-risk communities. If laws and bills are written correctly, these communities can grow while still decarbonizing,” says Christopher R. Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics and professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Roosevelt Project researcher.

Named for three iconic Roosevelts—Teddy, for his stewardship of the natural world; Franklin, for the infrastructure-focused New Deal; and Eleanor, for her passion for social justice—the project, a three-phase initiative of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, encompasses more than 30 MIT and Harvard economists, engineers, sociologists, urban planners, political scientists, and graduate students. The MIT research is supported by the Emerson Collective, which has longstanding interest in both social equity and climate.

In 1987 in a village in Mali, workers were digging a water well when they felt a rush of air. One of the workers was smoking a cigarette, and the air caught fire, burning a clear blue flame. The well was capped at the time, but in 2012, it was tapped to provide energy for the village, powering a generator for nine years.

The fuel source: geologic hydrogen.

For decades, hydrogen has been discussed as a potentially revolutionary fuel. But efforts to produce “green” hydrogen (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable electricity), “grey” hydrogen (making hydrogen from methane and releasing the biproduct carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere), “brown” hydrogen (produced through the gasification of coal), and “blue” hydrogen (making hydrogen from methane but capturing the CO₂) have thus far proven either expensive and/or energy-intensive. 

Enter geologic hydrogen. Also known as “orange,” “gold,” “white,” “natural,” and even “clear” hydrogen, geologic hydrogen is generated by natural geochemical processes in the Earth’s crust. While there is still much to learn, a growing number of researchers and industry leaders are hopeful that it may turn out to be an abundant and affordable resource lying right beneath our feet.

The construction of a new 17-MW microgrid for ViVaVerse Solutions, a colocation data center services provider, was announced this week.

Located at the former Compaq Computer/HPE headquarters in Houston, the more than 90-acre ViVa Center campus is being re-imagined as a mixed-use technology hub that will be home to a high-performance computing data center, more than 200 data labs and mission-critical infrastructure.

The natural gas-powered microgrid will be built and operated by RPower, a provider of prime and backup power solutions. RPower will manage the microgrid for ViVaVerse under a Resiliency-as-a-Service (RaaS) agreement, a business model that provides reliable electricity for a business should there be a grid outage.

Under this type of long-term service agreement, the RaaS developer installs, owns, operates and matains the microgrid so the customer can focus on their business, rather than the electricity powering their business. In return, the customer pays a flat monthly fee.

«We’re pleased to partner with RPower on this groundbreaking initiative, which will propel both the high-performance computing infrastructure in Houston and the energy transition in Texas,» said Eduardo Morales, CEO of ViVaVerse Solutions and Morales Capital Group.

Zhang reflects that she was drawn to the Institute by the promise of exciting research and brilliant people, but also by the emphasis on collaboration. “I have definitely have not been disappointed,” she says, citing the MIT community’s “collective desire to learn and do something meaningful with the knowledge you have.”

Zhang, a recipient of the Robert A. Laudise Memorial Fund scholarship, hopes to help society make great strides toward sustainability and clean energy. Recognizing a need for financial as well as technical expertise, she double majors in materials science and engineering and finance. Her curriculum includes coursework at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

To enable next-generation energy sources, she explains, it is critical to have both scientific knowledge and a firm understanding of the numbers involved. “Practical matters, like ‘What kind of financing do I need to actually create this manufacturing line?’” Being a double major, she says, “gives me this other viewpoint into the up-and-coming materials in the sustainability and energy space.”

Zhang applied this dual approach to choosing summer internships, seeking experience in both engineering and finance to help identify her ideal career choice. The summer after her first year at MIT, she interned at a hedge fund assisting with fund accounting, tax, and valuation. “From that I realized that I didn’t want to be doing just the finance side,” she says. “I was missing the stimulation from the science, the theoretical approach, all the things I love.”

The following summer, she worked in field engineering at an electronic components supplier for electric vehicle (EV) projects. “It was a little bit of engineering because you do have to understand what this battery system looks like for a car, and it was also a lot of business: thinking about sales and strategy and how to approach customers in these different fields.”

While she enjoyed working at the intersection of her two majors, this role “wasn’t quite technical enough for me,” she explains.

Ninalowo’s jitters were justified. Many in the industry and beyond have followed the Bronzeville microgrid project because it will provide power, when islanded, to customers in a residential and small business district in South Chicago, basically powering an entire neighborhood during outages.

“Other utilities have smaller scale microgrids,” said Ninalowo. “This is the first large microgrid serving a neighborhood with more than 1,000 customers.” 

Just as important, in 2025, the microgrid is expected to be capable of nesting with the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) microgrid located nearby. Right now, IIT is working on its own microgrid and is not yet ready to connect the two, said David O’Dowd, spokesman for ComEd.

With the microgrid connected to the IIT microgrid, both IIT and Bronzeville Community Microgrid customers could experience increased resiliency, he said. The microgrid clustering allows the two microgrids to operate islanded from the main utility grid but connected to each other, with each microgrid having its own controller.

The Bronzeville Community Microgrid, funded in part by a $4 million federal Department of Energy grant, consists of 750 kW of PV, a 500 kW/2 MWh energy storage system and 5 MW of dispatchable natural gas generation. The solar and storage are expected to keep the microgrid running for four hours. ComEd owns the battery, Enchanted Rock owns the natural gas generators, and the Chicago Housing Authority owns the solar PV. Siemens Energy and ComEd developed the microgrid’s master controller.