SAME Energy Security Webinar: AI as Load Shock: Rethinking Energy Security and Mission Assurance

The rapid expansion of AI computing, electrification, and mission-critical digital infrastructure is fundamentally altering the energy security landscape. While AI is often discussed as a software capability or data challenge, its most immediate national security impact is physical: unprecedented, concentrated, and inflexible electrical demand that stresses grid infrastructure and traditional resilience assumptions.

This session reframes AI for government policymakers, engineers, and facility managers as a load-driven stressor that challenges long-standing approaches to grid reliability, backup generation, fuel logistics, and distributed energy system design.

Drawing on perspectives from utilities, federal facility operators, regulators, and infrastructure developers, the webinar will examine how governments and system planners are responding to rapid load growth. Topics will include:
•     Utility-driven system expansion;
•     Long-lead centralized solutions such as SMR that will change the character of our electrical grid;
•     Near-term, deployable responses relevant to federal facilities – including flexible and dispatchable generation, fuel-agnostic system architectures, operational resilience strategies; and
•     Contracting and delivery models that can be implemented within existing policy and budget constraints.
Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how AI-driven demand is reshaping energy security considerations and what practical steps federal engineers and decision-makers can take today to support mission assurance in an increasingly volatile demand environment.