Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

Trust is often discussed as if it belongs in a values statement, a town hall, or a culture slide deck. In practice, it sits much closer to the daily mechanics of management. It shapes how quickly decisions move, how openly people speak, how much checking and rechecking a team needs, and whether employees believe what leaders say, whether the news is good or bad.

North American wholesale electricity markets moved through a spring shoulder week, with public disclosures pointing more to implementation work, scheduled meetings, settlement readiness, and refinement of transmission or interconnection processes than to broad reliability stress. In the West, California ISO continued to advance policy prioritization, interconnection-rights retention, and EDAM and DAME settlement readiness, while SPP’s western-facing calendar showed immediate post-expansion follow-through in both core RTO governance and Markets+ user forums. ERCOT’s public notices similarly reflected a system operating without a major headline emergency, yet still managing the practical demands of maintenance windows, market-system availability, and routine qualification activity. Across much of the footprint, that combination is typical of an orderly shoulder-season interval: fewer weather-driven extremes, but no reduction in the volume of market-design and readiness work that will shape the second half of 2026.

For years, utility leaders have treated cyber risk as a standing condition of the business. It sat on board agendas, in compliance binders, and in tabletop exercises. This week, it moved closer to the control room. On April 7, federal agencies warned that Iran-affiliated actors were actively exploiting internet-facing programmable logic controllers across U.S. critical infrastructure, including the energy sector. On April 8, NERC said it was actively monitoring the grid and had amplified the government advisory through the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center. That matters because PLCs are not office software. They sit close to physical operations.

There is a reason accountability has become a central topic in leadership discussions. Recently, the chatter about managers has been filled with familiar issues: slow decision-making, inconsistent follow-through, unclear priorities, burnout, and teams that are busy yet not accomplishing much that truly matters. Beneath the surface of slogans, most of these problems trace back to one simple issue: people are often unclear about what good work looks like, who owns which results, when a decision is final, or what happens when commitments are broken. That is an accountability issue.

North American wholesale electricity markets experienced a typical spring shoulder week characterized by generally moderate demand, increased renewable generation in several regions, and limited signs of widespread system stress. In the West, California ISO activity was driven more by policy and implementation efforts than by emergency operations: the ISO advanced its 2026 market-policy prioritization process, extended comment periods on storage design questions, issued updated RC West operating procedures, and continued preparations for Day-Ahead Market Enhancements and EDAM parallel operations. Meanwhile, SPP reached an operational milestone by completing its April 1 western RTO expansion, highlighting that both market footprint evolution and governance design are becoming as important this spring as short-term price formation.

In the central and eastern markets, the main theme continued to focus on market design, queue reform, and large-load or transmission readiness rather than urgent scarcity pricing. ERCOT issued routine operations messages but also highlighted a Taylor County contingency and a Railroad DC Tie derate, showing that localized operating issues still matter even during milder weeks. MISO persisted in pushing for interconnection and planning reforms, including queue improvements and the joint MISO-SPP targeted interconnection framework, while PJM stakeholders advanced a set of initiatives aimed at managing data-center load growth and progressing with its reformed interconnection process. In Canada, Alberta’s REM rule implementation and Ontario’s export-surcharge and capacity auction discussions kept policy risk and market redesign high on the agenda. Around the region, the week indicated that spring 2026 is becoming a transition period not only for weather and demand but also for market structure.

Recent discussions across the U.S. electric power industry have consistently focused on a key issue: leaders are trying to figure out how to handle large data-center loads, who should finance the necessary grid expansions, and how to maintain reliability and customer trust throughout the process. This concern has appeared in various forms, from a Texas legislative hearing, comments from regulators and grid operators, updates on utility special contracts, to reports on flexible load and ongoing warnings from reliability and planning organizations. When the same challenge keeps emerging across different parts of the industry, it usually indicates that managers need to stop viewing it solely as a forecasting issue and start addressing it as an operational challenge.

Over the past week, online leadership discussions have focused more than anything else on one issue: what managers are supposed to do now that AI has moved from pilot projects into everyday work. This isn't based on a single headline. It's reflected in survey data, executive research, HR guidance, and company decisions. Gartner reported that 45% of managers said AI had improved their teams’ work as much as they expected, but only 14% said they faced no challenges in helping their teams use it effectively. This gap reveals a lot. Teams see some benefits, but the truly difficult part has begun. The hard part isn't purchasing another tool; it's deciding how work should change, who owns what, what good output looks like, and how to maintain trust as the ground shifts beneath people’s feet.

This White Paper examines the strategic transition from short-term battery solutions toward long-duration energy storage (LDES) to ensure a dependable, low-carbon power grid. While lithium-ion batteries currently dominate the market by managing brief peaks and frequency stability, they are often uneconomical for the multi-day shortfalls caused by variable weather or seasonal shifts.

The paper explores a diverse range of emerging technologies, such as iron-air and flow batteries, which offer cost-effective alternatives for discharging power over ten to one hundred hours. Despite their potential, these innovations face hurdles including market designs that prioritize quick cycles over long-term reliability and the need for significant capital investment.

Federal initiatives like the Long Duration Storage Shot and new tax incentives are beginning to address these gaps by fostering a roadmap for commercial adoption. Ultimately, a diversified storage portfolio is essential for maintaining grid resilience as the United States integrates higher levels of renewable energy.

Across North American wholesale power markets, the week of March 21–27, 2026, was characterized more by ongoing efforts in structural reform than by widespread reliability emergencies. In the West, CAISO’s week focused on changes to transmission-planning schedules, EDAM and DAME market simulations and parallel operations, and updates to daily market-watch, renewable, storage, and queue materials. SPP’s week concentrated on its transition into the Consolidated Planning Process after FERC approval and on continuing development of the western markets through Markets+ and related stakeholder forums. In ERCOT and PJM, the main focus was on large-load and interconnection reforms, highlighting the ongoing impact of growth in data-center and other industrial loads on queue management, reliability planning, and market design.

I was going over the latest report from the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) this morning, and the numbers are enough to keep any utility manager awake at night. We’re talking about more than 3,500 physical security breaches against U.S. and Canadian power grids in 2025, a rise of seven hundred incidents in just one year. If you think back to when we started in this industry, the substation fence was mainly there to keep wandering cows or curious kids away from the high-voltage equipment. It wasn’t built as a defense against a coordinated ballistic attack or a high-tech drone.