Only 33% of utility executives call asset management advanced, IFS survey finds

According to an IFS study of 850 C-level and senior utility executives conducted by Censuswide, 26% are actively re-evaluating asset portfolios to prioritize investment in existing grid infrastructure.

IFS calls the result a pendulum swing away from investment agendas once led by sustainability and decarbonization goals. Carol Johnston, IFS's vice president for energy, utilities and resources, said sustainability is still a critical objective, but decades of under-investment, rigid rate cases and an aging grid now force utilities to fix reliability, resilience and affordability all at once.

The more useful finding for whoever runs a utility's asset program sits further down the release.

AI expectations meet siloed asset data

Only 33% of respondents describe their asset lifecycle management as advanced. Another 51% say they have asset management systems in place but run them in silos, with limited predictive capability, and 49% say operational data silos get in the way of real-time decisions.

That gap matters because of what IFS says Industrial AI is for: tying fragmented systems together, predicting equipment failures before they cause grid downtime, and automating operational workflows.

Fifty-seven percent of utility executives call AI critical to cutting costs; only 33% rate the asset management that AI would run on as advanced. For utilities whose data still sits in silos, that gap suggests the first AI spending could go to integration work rather than the model itself. IFS reaches a similar conclusion in its own terms: it argues digital programs should be measured on grid uptime, customer experience and regulatory compliance, and that software adoption for its own sake doesn't count.

Existing wires and rising rates

Affordability is the other half of the survey's headline, and it connects straight to the asset data problem. The Pew Charitable Trusts, in an April 28 policy report, noted that utilities across the U.S. are proposing large capital expenditures to modernize their grids, and that the spending is putting upward pressure on the rates customers pay. Johnston made a related argument in the IFS release: utilities can't build their way out with new infrastructure alone, and need to get more from existing assets while investing selectively in new capacity.

Panelists at an Environmental and Energy Study Institute briefing on grid reliability went further. The briefing cited a Grid Strategies analysis estimating that expanding transmission capacity could save U.S. households $6.3 billion to $10.4 billion a year, after paying for the new infrastructure.

The sources pull in two directions here. An EESI briefing on improving grid reliability and resilience to lower energy bills said expanding transmission capacity could save U.S. households between $6.3 and $10.4 billion per year after accounting for the cost of new infrastructure. Pew warns that modernization capex puts upward pressure on rates, and neither says whether bills rise first and fall later.

A large wave of grid spending

These choices sit inside a very large investment wave. J.P. Morgan's grid resilience outlook puts numbers on the spending ahead.

Of the roughly $5.8 trillion J.P. Morgan forecasts for global grid upgrades from 2026 to 2035, about $700 billion is for digital grid tech. That smaller slice carries outsized weight: J.P. Morgan describes software as the computational brain of grid hardware, informing where the next hardware dollar and the next maintenance crew should go. Utilities that already rate their asset management as advanced could be better placed to aim hardware spending with data.

The IFS respondents are also moving toward grid flexibility, specifically battery energy storage systems and distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS), to handle volatile demand and guard against long outages. The Pew Charitable Trusts says that fully using distributed energy resources through virtual power plants, including appropriate compensation for their owners, could deliver power during peak demand at 40% to 60% of the cost of traditional solutions. Pew adds that virtual power plants can enable utilities to defer or even avoid costly traditional infrastructure investments. For a planner weighing a substation upgrade against a distributed energy program, that range could serve as a benchmark to test vendor quotes against.

How far to trust the pendulum

Two caveats apply. IFS commissioned the survey and sells the Industrial AI and asset management software it recommends, and the maturity figures are executives rating their own organizations. The swing is also partial: IFS itself says sustainability remains a critical objective, so decarbonization is still on the agenda. It has been joined by the maintenance backlog.