Utilities must evolve into agile, platform-first orchestrators – EY Consulting’s Gregory Poussardin

He stressed that innovation is the most indispensable element in accelerating the energy transition.

The global energy landscape is transforming rapidly, driven by the push for sustainability, resilience, and carbon neutrality. Utilities must now navigate challenges from regulatory alignment and financing to cross-border collaboration and digital innovation.

Offering valuable insights is Gregory Poussardin, Partner at EY Consulting, with 20 years of experience advising leading Power and Utility corporations across water, wastewater, electricity and gas. He has led business strategy, operating model development and large-scale digital-enabled transformations across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Oceania, and Asia. Now based in Kuala Lumpur, he focuses on supporting Malaysian and ASEAN utilities in their Energy Transition journey, driving sustainable innovation towards a Net-Zero future.

As a judge at the Asian Power Awards 2025, Gregory delved into how utilities can address regulatory and technological complexities, harness digital innovation, and deliver measurable impact to accelerate the transition towards a sustainable Net-Zero future.

What are some of the key challenges utilities face when implementing cross-border energy collaboration, and how can these be effectively addressed?

Globally, we are witnessing an unprecedented drive to integrate national power systems into a unified, supercharged energy ecosystem. Cross-border energy collaboration is no longer a lofty aspiration but a practical imperative, an interconnected ecosystem where political will, regulatory innovation, and technological advancement must converge. It is a pivot with the potential to redefine how entire regions achieve energy security, resilience, and carbon neutrality. This topic is even more critical for dynamic and resource-diverse areas like Southeast Asia. For example, at COP29 in Baku, we have seen leaders from major utilities committed to accelerating power grid interconnections across ASEAN countries, aiming to boost regional energy security and stability through cross-border electricity trading and integrated regional grids.

Why is cross-border collaboration indispensable? Because it’s a critical catalyst for countries to reduce reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets, shield consumers from price shocks, and unlock regional grid stability that can significantly mitigate local power outages and emergencies. Consider the 2025 blackout event earlier this year in Spain and Portugal. This European experience is a powerful global example: cross-border grids, governed by independent system operators and harmonised regulatory regimes, provide resilience through mutual support and shared balancing of supply-demand mismatches. For some other regions, especially Asia, the value extends beyond security and resilience: the opportunity to integrate a vast renewable energy potential across varied geographies is a game-changer. With solar-rich equatorial zones, hydro in mountainous and coastal-wind areas, cross-border grids offer an opportunity to balance intermittent renewables regionally, rather than nationally. This will not only advance carbon neutrality goals but will also drive economic growth and equitable access to clean power.

Such collaboration, however, remains one of the most complex endeavours utilities face. To move towards delivering tangible outcomes, utilities and policymakers must shift from a challenge-focused mindset to one rooted in deliberate planning and disciplined execution. This requires a clear focus on five key considerations.

The true challenge lies not just in dollars or kilometres of cables; it’s the institutional architecture. Central to cross-border energy collaboration lies the need for harmonised regulatory and legal frameworks. Success requires aligning fragmented national priorities, regulatory frameworks, power trade agreements, and market mechanisms across sovereignties that historically operated energy in silos. Without aligned market rules and transparent pricing structures, cross-border power flows risk becoming transactional battlegrounds mired in disputes rather than mechanisms unlocking mutual benefits. Regulatory harmonisation is foundational. Energy cannot flow freely without coordinated laws and consistent compliance frameworks. Mismatched tariff designs and diverging market regulations create transactional frictions that slow integration and undermine investor confidence. A robust legal architecture coupled with clear power trade agreements, whether bilateral or multilateral, is essential. Such frameworks instil trust and predictability, enabling participants to operate with certainty in a complex, interconnected environment. Utilities in Southeast Asia contend with a patchwork of diverse regulatory environments, varying tariff structures, and nationalistic energy policies that have consistently hindered seamless grid integration. The ASEAN Power Grid initiative alone illustrates the scale of the ambition, with a projected build cost of $200b by 2040 (Source: ASEAN Interconnection Masterplan Study (AIMS) III Report, ASEAN Center for Energy). This number does not spotlight the scale only. It is a clear signal of both the region’s potential and the complexity ahead.

The presence of an Independent Grid Operator (IGO) is another non-negotiable prerequisite for effective cross-border grid orchestration. IGOs serve as impartial coordinators of power flows and custodians of grid stability whilst insulating operations from political interference that historically derails regional collaboration. Europe’s success story owes much to entities like ENTSO-E, which efficiently governs the Continental European Grid through transparent, technical, and market-based oversight. An IGO acts as a neutral arbiter, facilitating cooperation, ensuring reliability, and amplifying system-wide benefits that transcend national borders.

Cross-border collaboration also demands innovative market mechanisms that enable transparent and efficient energy valuation across diverse regulatory environments. This challenge calls for next-generation digital platforms that support energy trading, harnessing artificial intelligence to enable real-time, trustless verification and settlement of transactions. Such technologies would dissolve traditional barriers, promote liquidity, and create dynamic price signals that reflect true supply-demand dynamics, paving the way for optimised capacity utilisation and minimised curtailment. Imagine a world where seamless power transactions flow across borders, much like an “energy internet”.

The infrastructure and digital backbone required for cross-border integration are capital-intensive and demand sophisticated financing models. Success hinges on blending public, private, and multilateral funding sources with innovative risk-sharing frameworks that attract long-term investment whilst managing sovereign and operational risks. In developing regions, creative financing approaches involving multilateral development banks coupled with private investor participation have proven essential in accelerating infrastructure rollout and de-risking projects at scale. Without sustainable financial structures, the vision of interconnected clean energy markets remains out of reach.

Effective regional collaboration requires transcending transactional bilateral deals; it requires co-creating an interoperable energy ecosystem. This can be shaped by digitalisation to operate across systems, markets, and stakeholders. It is a call for deploying cutting-edge technologies such as smart grids, energy market platforms, and AI-powered data exchanges to slash operational frictions. Shared digital infrastructure, dynamic grid architectures and interoperable data hubs have the potential to empower grid operators to simulate network dynamics, collaboratively manage contingencies, and optimise asset utilisation in real-time.

Ultimately, TRUST is perhaps the most intangible yet indispensable element to convert a fragmented mosaic of national grids into synchronised and resilient regional energy ecosystems to turbocharge the global energy transition.

In your view, how are AI and predictive analytics changing the way utilities plan and operate increasingly complex power systems?

This topic is especially relevant today as intelligence, foresight, and dynamic control increasingly shape the management of complex power systems. In our industry, AI and predictive analytics capabilities have evolved beyond mere tools into the fundamental operating backbone. They are becoming the neural system of modern utilities, transforming them into hyper-efficient operators. Picture a hyperconnected smart grid where deep reinforcement learning algorithms autonomously balance supply-demand dynamics across minutes, or microclimates, maximising renewable penetration whilst slashing curtailment.

The power sector's complexity is no longer chaos–it is a data-rich environment. Energy leaders harness AI not just for predictive maintenance but for real-time optimisation of energy flows, blurring lines between generation and consumption. This seismic shift is reshaping every facet of the utility, from enriching customer experience to enhancing strategic planning, daily infrastructure management, and market engagement. Together, these AI-driven innovations form the backbone of a new utility era where intelligent simulations model every electron's path.

When it comes to customer experience, AI-powered large language models and machine learning are no longer just behind chatbots. They have become orchestration engines that anticipate and personalise the entire customer journey. Predictive systems suggest bespoke energy-saving tips, tailor dynamic tariff options, and alert customers proactively before outages or billing anomalies occur. According to Gartner, 30% of Fortune 500 companies will exclusively use AI-enabled channels for customer service by 2030, with 70% of customer journeys beginning and ending with conversational AI assistants. In the power and utilities sector, these AI agents have the potential to humanise digital interactions by adapting tone and autonomously handling workflows ranging from service scheduling to dispute resolution, driving significant reductions in call volumes and boosting customer satisfaction. Another example is in credit and collections, where automated virtual agents can now execute flexible payment plans autonomously, blending financial prudence with empathetic customer care.

Beyond these surface interactions, AI has the potential to transform the traditionally disconnected front-office and back-office operations, typically divided between customer services and network units, marrying customer insights with operational realities to propose a seamless experience. For instance, consumption patterns, connection or disconnection requests, outage reports, and payment interactions in the front office can automatically inform back-office dispatching and system diagnostics; conversely, operational data about faults or maintenance can feed into personalised customer communications. This end-to-end AI-driven alignment fosters a step-change in operating models, synchronising processes and teams across departments, up to merging these capabilities to respond to customer needs not just faster, but smarter, more proactively and across the value chain.

On the strategic planning capabilities, AI has the potential to fuel a dynamic new era of decision-making through digital twins simulating grid behaviour from generation to distribution. Unlike conventional grid simulations that offer static or near-static snapshots, these virtual networks now provide real-time, dynamic virtual replicas tied directly to live grid data and environmental inputs, tracking physical assets, system states, and external variables in continuous interaction. They create a powerful "digital asset lab," enabling utilities to simulate asset lifecycles, stress-test operational risks, and evaluate renewable integration scenarios with unprecedented precision and granularity. In Asia, where grids must juggle renewables variability, urbanisation spikes, and rapid digital adoption, AI-enabled predictive energy orchestration is a must-have. For example, operators can simulate the impact of introducing large-scale solar farms under varying weather conditions or test how distributed energy resources respond across time and geography, all before investing in physical infrastructure changes. This capability transforms strategic planning from static forecasts into adaptive, data-driven foresight, allowing accelerated clean energy deployment, prioritised asset maintenance, and optimised capital investment, thereby maximising grid resilience and value realisation.

In daily core operations and infrastructure management, AI algorithms can recalibrate supply-demand balance, continuously managing fluctuations to maximise renewable energy use whilst minimising curtailment. Another innovation area is how AI and IoT transform asset performance management. Leading utilities across Asia and beyond now implement new models to forecast asset health and operational risks with unprecedented accuracy. From my own experience on the ground, advanced predictive analytics now decode complex signals from underground power cables. These algorithms are used to detect insulation degradation early to shift reactive maintenance from costly calendar schedules to condition-based interventions. Such an initiative has the potential to accelerate the energy transition whilst delivering benefits to consumers, as per one of my articles published a couple of months ago. Similarly, some advanced utilities are implementing AI-IOT-powered forecasts to help manage loading at low-voltage networks, allowing operators to dynamically optimise maintenance and dispatch, delivering measurable value through fewer outages, lower emergency costs, and improved customer trust. These foresights convert uncertainty into actionable insight, also contributing to optimising both CAPEX and OPEX expenditures. The AI universe on power infrastructure is vast, transforming potential into impactful solutions used at the core of the operations.

In liberalised markets, leading utilities are also leveraging AI to transform market, trade and pricing mechanisms with more transparent, predictive engines that forecast price volatility and customer demand at granular scales. These utilities are evolving from passive asset owners into agile platform orchestrators, enabling vibrant decentralised energy economies and unlocking new revenue opportunities.

What I have witnessed firsthand is that the true game-changer is not just the AI and machine learning algorithms themselves. It is the ability to holistically embrace AI as a catalyst for cultural and operational transformation. Success hinges equally on redesigning supporting processes, reshaping organisational habits, and evolving ways of working. Without this foundational shift, even the most advanced models remain underutilised. Equally vital is governing AI ethically and transparently to build trust with customers, regulators, and employees. Utilities must also upgrade their IoT infrastructure alongside robust cyber defence capabilities; AI’s power amplifies only when fed with quality, secure data. Finally, being relentlessly value-driven is paramount: power utilities must deeply understand how AI initiatives deliver measurable outcomes and rigorously monitor to sustain beyond ephemeral pilots.

What strategic changes in utility operating models do you see as most critical for accelerating the energy transition?

Before diving in, it is important to frame the energy transition as multifaceted, with several overlapping and simultaneous shifts at varying scales and paces. These transitions demand that utilities fundamentally evolve. No longer can they cling to their historic, centralised operating DNA. Instead, utilities must become agile, platform-first orchestrators of sprawling, decentralised energy ecosystems, where distributed energy resources, prosumers, digital marketplaces, and dynamic grid interactions thrive symbiotically. The urgency of this shift is especially vivid across the Asia Pacific, where rapid electrification must synchronise with an explosive adoption of renewables and digital technologies to meet ambitious sustainability goals.

At its core, the strategic shift involves moving away from rigid, asset-heavy mindsets and embracing “energy-as-a-software-service.” This means investing in modular, cloud-native infrastructures that seamlessly integrate renewables, electric vehicle charging networks, battery storage, and sector coupling, all coordinated through open APIs and real-time telemetry. However, digitalisation alone cannot deliver transformation at scale. Utilities must embed a DevOps culture emphasising rapid experimentation, customer-centric iteration, and startup-like agility. This cultural shift would dissolve bureaucratic silos that stifle innovation and enable continuous adaptation to evolving market needs and regulatory landscapes.

Looking globally, leading utilities are abandoning the traditional asset ownership playbook in favour of value orchestration. In our region, Tokyo Electric pioneers digital marketplaces aiming to unbundle value chains, enabling real-time peer-to-peer power trading and dynamic grid balancing powered by AI. South Australian Power Networks is charting a compelling course as a Distribution System Operator aggressively integrating consumer energy resources like rooftop solar, batteries, and EVs into a flexible, consumer-led grid. Their approach deploys smart grid innovations, including flexible exports, virtual power plants, active solar trials, and time-of-use tariffs to optimise network use whilst supporting decarbonisation. This vision extends beyond infrastructure to foster deep government-industry collaboration and unlock a consumer-centric energy system that reduces bills, enhances reliability, and accelerates sustainable growth. In Europe, Ørsted has transformed from a traditional utility into a global leader in offshore wind and renewable energy. They use digital technologies and data-driven insights to optimise generation and accelerate the shift to a clean, flexible energy system. Those examples highlight a shared evolution in terms of operating models: from centralised utilities to interconnected energy platforms powered by data and collaboration.

Such operating model transformation requires cultivating interdisciplinary and data-fluent teams. These hybrid teams drive nuanced insights from complex data streams and customer behaviours, shifting utilities from product suppliers to adaptable platforms that anticipate and meet diverse consumer and market demands.

Beyond technology, data and talents, utilities must internalise systemic thinking, e.g. viewing energy networks as interconnected, adaptive systems rather than silos. Governance structures must evolve to incentivise exponential innovation beyond traditional boundaries. Utilities embracing these strategic shifts are expected to thrive as architects of an innovative, resilient, and sustainable energy future.

What I have witnessed firsthand is that the true game-changer is not just the AI and machine learning algorithms themselves. It is the ability to holistically embrace AI as a catalyst for cultural and operational transformation. Success hinges equally on redesigning supporting processes, reshaping organisational habits, and evolving ways of working. Without this foundational shift, even the most advanced models remain underutilised. Equally vital is governing AI ethically and transparently to build trust with customers, regulators, and employees. Utilities must also upgrade their IoT infrastructure alongside robust cyber defence capabilities; AI’s power amplifies only when fed with quality, secure data. Finally, being relentlessly value-driven is paramount: power utilities must deeply understand how AI initiatives deliver measurable outcomes and rigorously monitor to sustain beyond ephemeral pilots.

How can utilities effectively measure and communicate their progress on energy transition goals to build transparency and trust with stakeholders?

That is a relevant question that I am hearing more and more from utilities these days. With all the pressure from investors, regulators, and customers for energy players to show real progress on their energy transition goals, measuring and communicating that progress effectively is crucial. Utilities are no longer just managing operations. They are being constantly benchmarked on a whole range of metrics, from their renewable energy mix to grid reliability, customer satisfaction and ESG ratings. I would say this challenge of measurement and communication is undoubtedly one of the top priorities for utilities driving the energy transition today. Utilities can no longer rely on dormant, annual sustainability reports filled with jargon that rarely resonates with stakeholders. Trust is forged through radical transparency, enabled by integrated, real-time digital platforms that deliver verifiable, accessible, and engaging impact data.

Imagine digital-enabled Carbon Ledger ecosystems that track every megawatt-hour of renewable energy generation, verified through independent audits, accessible to investors, regulators, communities, and customers alike, a veritable “open banking” approach to carbon credits. Emerging green hydrogen hubs across Asia may provide fertile ground to experiment with groundbreaking transparency, shifting stakeholders from passive observers to empowered participants in live energy transition data.

But transparency alone is not sufficient; contextualisation is key. Utilities must leverage AI-driven natural language generation to convert complex, raw KPIs into personalised and narrative-rich insights. It is also about having clear, credible data and telling the story in a way that builds trust and transparency with all stakeholders involved. This interactive information demystifies emissions data, energy efficiency metrics, and transition milestones, linking them directly to tangible business resilience, regulatory compliance, and societal benefits. And they must be tailored to diverse audiences.

Leading utilities like Iberdrola go further by democratising accountability. They actively engage third-party “energy auditors,” citizen scientists, NGOs, and community groups in co-validating emissions and impact data. This participatory approach dismantles traditional utility opacity, transforming the sector into an open innovation platform that fosters trust and collective progress toward shared sustainability goals. Further innovation lies in creating multi-stakeholder impact measurement ecosystems, web platforms, an on-demand data hub and interactive dashboards enabling continuous stakeholder engagement, feedback loops, and transparent governance of data sources and methodology.

Ultimately, this approach can redefine impact measurement as participatory, hyper-transparent, and data-rich, not a bureaucratic burden but a strategic asset. It transforms utility sustainability efforts into compelling narratives of progress and accountability that cement trust, enhance reputation, and secure long-term operational licenses in an increasingly scrutiny-intense world, not only to external stakeholders but also to internal talents themselves. Only then does sustainability become a competitive multiplier.

As a judge at the Asian Power Awards 2025, what do you look for when evaluating how well a project’s real-world outcomes align with its intended goals?

From my perspective, judging a project’s success is not just about ticking boxes on innovation or flashy technology. It is about the honest assessment of real-world impact, where the rubber meets the road between vision and execution. Sometimes, in our industry, we get dazzled by the allure of shiny speeches, but the real question is: Did it deliver meaningful and measurable value? Did it move the needle on resilience, sustainability, cost-efficiency, or people impact in a way that truly changes the game?

This year, I will look for projects with tangible outcomes on carbon reductions, grid reliability, affordability, or community empowerment. I am particularly interested in projects that weave together advanced technologies, Analytics, AI, ML, IoT, not as isolated curiosities but as an integrated, intelligent ecosystem that dynamically optimises resources and engages customers meaningfully. Projects where innovation has been embedded into core operations, not parked on the sidelines.

I used scalability as another litmus test during my assessment: can the solution be replicated or adapted across different geographies, regulatory regimes, and market conditions without losing effectiveness? Successful projects anticipate scaling challenges.

Most importantly, and as always to me, the ultimate measure of success lies in the impact on human lives. Behind each initiative, there must be a vision for a better life, a project that empowers communities, accelerates decarbonisation to halt climate change, enhances economic opportunity, and creates jobs. The most compelling projects prioritise equity, inclusion, and resilience. They demonstrate tangible benefits to real people: safer neighbourhoods, affordable power, and a future where clean energy is not a privilege but a given.

In essence, my focus is and remains on bold projects that do not just push technical boundaries but genuinely embed measurable and lasting value.