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The United States is embarking on its biggest energy buildout in a generation. One that will likely need all participants in the country’s infrastructure development ecosystem to not just collaborate and but ‘co-innovate.’
From offshore oil and gas exploration to utility-scale renewables, nuclear to the country’s much talked about liquefied natural gas terminals – a wave of energy projects are either in development or potentially on the horizon.
This need not come as a surprise. With the proliferation of hyperscale data centers – a space where the U.S. is leading the world in numbers and size – demand for power (and related water and cooling solutions) is growing exponentially.
The American Society of Civil Engineers reckons that of the $10 trillion or so needed stateside over the next 10 years, a fifth ought to be allocated to energy infrastructure, with a keen a focus on building resilience into the nation’s power grids.
Much of this would require additional natural gas and micro as well as macro nuclear energy projects alongside renewables. Under president Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Energy also deems brownfield coal-fired power to be a part of the solution.
Energy secretary Chris Wright routinely emphasizes that taking sources of “generation off the grid that compromise energy reliability and needlessly raise energy costs for Americans” is simply not going to happen under the Trump administration. That’s why in 2025, sites totalling more than 17 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity generation were not just saved and but strengthened.
Under this new pressure to build resilience across the U.S. energy landscape and ensure resource adequacy, experts say the industry can no longer rely on legacy delivery and operating models to service an economy premised on digitization and automation. These twin facets are in turn underpinned by electrification.
‘Co-Innovation’ Needed
Energy project sponsors, engineering, procurement and construction firms, and their industrial and software vendor partners are calling for blueprints to build smart, agile and resilient foundations to meet this growing challenge.
Less than a decade ago, typically a project concept was devised by a sponsor, an EPC firm mandated to build it to a specific remit with a ‘bolt on’ solutions philosophy in concert with industrial and software solutions vendors.
But in the digital age, faced with rising pressures of building energy resilience, the old way of doing things needs to change, according to industry experts at the Energy Projects Conference and Expo 2026 held earlier this month in Houston, America’s energy capital.
The wider industry thinking increasingly happens to be that digital and autonomous tools at the sector’s disposal ought to be brought to bear more meaningfully. Such a move would also help de-risk investments in this changed but exciting landscape and help address the one constant that’s always been…
Read More: U.S. Banking On ‘Co-Innovation’ For Its Trillion Dollar Energy Build
