← CERAWeek Podcast with Atul Arya
CERAWeek Podcast with Atul Arya
Hanna Grene, Microsoft, on Matching 100% of Global Electricity Demand with Renewables
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Sarawik Podcast, where the world's energy leaders and innovators share insights on the future of energy, technology and climate. I am Atul Arya, Chief Energy strategist at S and P Global. In each episode, we dive into the critical issues and bold ideas shaping our energy future. So let's get started. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Sarah Week Podcast. I am Atul Arya, Chief energy strategist at S and P Global and today we are going to talk about how AI is reshaping the world of energy. So we have been having quite a few conversations in the podcast about AI and today we have a real expert who comes from the energy sector but now working for Microsoft. So welcome, welcome, Hannah Green, to Sarah Week Podcast.
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Thank you so much for having me, Atul. Sarah Week is a highlight in my year and in my team's year, and it is such an important gathering for this critical conversation at this critical time.
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Of course. So, Hannah, welcome. You are Global Go to Market and Innovation leader in the Global Energy and Resources team at Microsoft. So I look forward to this conversation. Let's just start setting the scene a little bit. How do you see AI reshaping energy and the importance of energy to AI?
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This is a key conversation across energy and technology. And I daresay, Atul, we've been having this conversation for the last two, three years at Sarah Week, but this year I think we jump into our time together in Houston at a different level. Today AI is truly reshaping energy. And energy is a strategic input to the success and continued scaling and growth of global AI ambitions across sectors far beyond energy. And so really, we're moving from ambition to execution. The world now has AI at scale. It is no longer a differentiator in any industry to be using AI in your company. It is a differentiator if you have moved to scale. Strategic alignment of how you are deploying AI to increase revenues in your business and accelerate what you and your teams are delivering on and speed using AI at speed and transforming your organization with AI at speed. That's the broader AI conversation that we're having with our customers across every industry today. And what that means for energy is that we have to have the infrastructure to back it up, not just for Microsoft, but for every AI player in the market. Our technology rides on the infrastructure brought to us by energy. And so we are in a much more matured place, I would say, with AI globally and with AI usage in energy enterprises than we were just even a year ago. And it's a massive moment for that scale of transformation.
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It used to be that the sector took energy supply as a given, right? But the world has now changed very much. So how has your energy strategy changed as you're describing, with all this massive
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growth in AI, Even before we get into our energy strategy, I want to pull back a minute and think about the scale of what we are embarking on. Not just we at Microsoft, but we globally here. As we enter this conversation about the nexus between technology and energy, we all think, those of us that are economists and historians by training or by interest, we think about these massive infrastructure transformations in time. Railroads, the building of the initial power grid, the building up our first power plants and then later telecom and then Internet and in the cloud. And AI is that stage and that scale of infrastructure transformation and of that level of infrastructure build out. This is a global shift taking place that requires real energy capabilities, new power plant capabilities, and new conversations about how we're going to deliver AI infrastructure around the world. I think it's important to step back always and think about the North Star, that globally we need energy access to grow, not just to deliver on this massive AI enterprise that's taking place around the world, but to provide power affordably and reliably to billions of people around the world who do not have access to it today or who are worried about the affordability and reliability of their access. And this goes again beyond AI. It's about re industrialization, it's about the electrification of transportation, and it's about that broad energy access conversation. So before I even get into Microsoft's strategy here, I always find it's helpful to pull back and think we're a piece in this big puzzle. But the big North Star conversation is around scaling energy access while we ensure affordability and reliability. And that means different things in different parts of the world. That's a different conversation in Singapore than it is in London, than it is here in Southern California. We enter into that frame from a Microsoft energy strategy. In 2020, we announced a breakthrough commitment to become carbon negative by 2030. As a company with milestones from how we would get from 2020 to that future state just four short years ahead of us in 2030. And I am so pleased to share with you, Atul, that we just announced a key milestone on that journey. In 2025, we've been able to match 100% of our annual global electricity consumption with renewable energy. And to make that happen, as we've been talking about the scale of what we need to deliver in energy here, that means we contracted 40 gigawatts of renewable energy supply across 26 countries. To get there, we worked an extremely deep partnership with the energy industry, working with more than 95 utilities and developers. And we have over 400 different partners that we've worked with to make that goal happen. I always have to think about sort of that magnitude of power, 40 gigawatts in terms of what does that mean for real people. And that's enough Energy to power 10 million US homes. We are so proud to have hit that key milestone on a broader journey to go carbon negative as a company.
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Congratulations on achieving that. I do remember one of your predecessors from Microsoft Co. I think seven or eight years back when you had just announced this goal or soon after I should say, and we all kind of wondered what are you guys thinking? So it looks like you were able to achieve that, which is fantastic. And when you say renewables, it is all kind of renewables in your portfolio just maybe give a of a flavor to our audience. What you mean?
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You're absolutely right. I mean these were big, hairy, ambitious goals when we announced them. And our 2030 goals still feel big and ambitious to us. And so you're right. It's one thing to announce it, it's quite another to go execute and achieve it and have that result to share with you. I share that with massive pride for our energy core team that delivered on that goal and a huge congratulations to them as we think about renewables. This goal was specific to renewable energy. But renewable energy is not the end all of our carbon energy portfolio. As we work towards that carbon negative goal by 2030, our global strategy does require a broader set of carbon free energy and grid enabling technologies. So we are thinking today on our data center energy teams about next generation grid infrastructure, about carbon capture technology. We've made some serious investments into the nuclear space with our announcements with Helion and Constellation Energy in Washington State and of course our well known project with Constellation to restart Crane Clean Energy center in Pennsylvania as well. So it's renewables for this milestone, but the bigger target and meeting a global goal has to be about a broader set of technologies to get us there.
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Yeah, more than just renewables. You know I read that Microsoft, you are committed to to Community First AI infrastructure. Can you expound on this? What does this mean?
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This was an announcement from our president Brad Smith about our commitment to Community First AI infrastructure. And I have to share. It hits home for me personally. I grew up in Kansas on a farm down a dirt road out in the country and on the land that my family has. We have a gas pipeline that runs through it, we have a power line that runs through it. We're a power corridor family in terms of our land that we have horses and agriculture on. To me personally, I know that this energy infrastructure is not hypothetical. It's very real and very tangible for the communities that we put energy infrastructure in and that we put technology infrastructure in, including our data centers. When we announced this commitment as Microsoft, it hit hum. And the commitment is how do we ensure and how will we ensure that the communities that are hosting this essential infrastructure towards this global AI project and investment that we are making towards our future, how do they feel the net positive impact of others investments? The first piece, communities are very clearly concerned about rising energy costs. They have concerns about resilience and they have concerns in the current economic environment that we are in about jobs. How do we as somebody making an investment in the communities where we're looking to build and grow our data center footprint? How do we make sure that we're helping to understand their concerns and then help deliver against them? And so we have five commitments we've made as a part of this pledge. The first, that will pay our way to ensure that our data centers don't increase electricity prices. We are not going to move our costs onto the costs of a customer. We are going to own those costs as an infrastructure company and make sure that we're owning our full cost of electricity. The second, we're going to minimize our water use. We've been doing a lot of work on minimizing water use in data centers and we'll replenish more than we use. The third, we will create jobs for residents and make sure that we are part of the economic success of the communities where we are placing these investments. Fourth, we're going to add to the tax base and that tax base is very meaningful in any community, but particularly in some of the rural communities where we're engaging. And fifth, we will strengthen the presence in that community by investing in local AI training and nonprofits. If you are a community that is going to play a part in hosting the critical infrastructure for AI and for energy, we want to make you a part of the success of that technology and we're going to do that through those investments.
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That's great that you have made this community first commitments, Hannah. So let's just talk about the importance of application of AI. How is AI reducing energy demand and also growing energy access?
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This is where my team really gets to lean in and be excited about the innovation of what AI can deliver for the energy industry. And there are two big vectors here. The first, how do we use what we have more efficiently in this complex grid system that we've developed? How do we tap in to the latent inefficiencies that we have there today to use what we have better? And the second is how do we get more power online faster? And we need to be attacking the problem from both angles. So the first we are today with our close partners at grid controls companies, at grid modeling and planning companies, we are using AI to orchestrate the grid more efficiently with our partners at Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric's digital grid platforms, from their ADMS capabilities to their distributed energy to resource management systems, to some of the AI for disruptive events that we're going to be showing at this year's Sarah Week. Those are built in close partnership with Microsoft US as their technology and AI partner, Schneider as a leading grid controls provider. And so part of what Schneider's been doing is thinking about how do we manage the grid in more real time? How are we able to help our customers reduce their interconnection timelines and how can we help them reduce outages, all with digital tooling. And they've been massively successful in that, with their capabilities reducing outages by up to 40% with their customers and decreasing interconnection timelines by 25%. So ensuring the reliability of the grids we have today and using real time visibility all the way to the grid edge, all the way to the meter to better orchestrate and leverage the resources we have and then again, reducing those interconnect timelines, getting more resources onto the grid faster. Schneider Electric's been a tremendous leader in this space with their one digital grid platform on the other side, getting more things online faster. Two other things I've been really excited about. We have partners at ThinkLabs AI which is a company that specializes in AI driven grid solutions that with Southern California Edison has been analyzing their electric distribution and and sub transmission models to get the grid energization requests moving faster. How do we get more customers online with their energization requests faster? How do we ensure the reliability of those systems while taking a process that might have been months of individual simulation and engineering reviews and boiling it down into days and weeks. That's a really powerful way that AI is fundamentally changing how we're working, building and rebuilding grids and supporting our customers and then on the get more online faster in the power side of this equation, outside of just grids, my team has led a project here at Microsoft developing generative AI for permitting. And we started a few years ago targeting permitting for nuclear because we knew if we could figure out nuclear energy, not only could we make a big dent in getting more carbon free energy through the valley of permitting death, unfortunately that they were experiencing and projects were dying out of, but we knew if we could work this through for the nuclear industry, we could also light it up for wind, for solar, and in future for things like transmission networks. We are now a few years into this project, we have over 50 companies around the world leveraging our generative AI capabilities. We have regulators using our generative AI permitting capabilities as well to understand the permitting applications that are in front of them. And I'm very proud to say that Idaho National Labs just released an evaluation of our generative AI permitting platform. And part of their findings was that using AI tools like this, we can cut the efficiency of more projects getting online and getting through permitting by up to 50% and actually improve the regulatory review cycle as well. So this has been a project that we're very pleased to have seen, really scale and make a dent in more carbon free energy coming online.
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You're really having big applications of AI not just within the company, but also with your customers and seeing results from that, right?
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Absolutely. And I'm often asked, when is AI for grid impact coming? And I hope you hear in my answer, it's here today.
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How about having energy companies particularly operate more efficiently and also meet the rising energy demand? Can you give us an example of in that space?
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Before, I wanted to share some stories of where our partners working with their customers like Southern California Edison and Constellation. Our partners at Alo Atomics we've been working with on nuclear, how they're using those AI tools. But when we think about energy enterprises across the energy value chain and how they're applying AI inside their own operations in the IT and enterprise productivity space, we really see four key areas where companies are scaling their AI usage at that enterprise level. So the first, and this is the low hanging fruit of course, is workforce productivity and health and safety. So getting AI tools into the hands of your workforce so that they can start applying them to their work, to their daily processes and improving again productivity and health and safety for frontline workers and across the full enterprise. The second is customer experience and engagement, particularly with utilities and retail energy providers. AI has provided a huge boost in outcomes in reduced O and M cost and an improved customer experience by allowing you to be more proactive and more intelligent about your customer needs and customer communications. The third, and where I get excited about, where I've highlighted some of these big opportunities is intelligent assets. When we think about the big future opportunity for AI, really fundamentally helping us change orchestration of our energy systems and finding those efficiencies and unlocks, it's going to be in asset intelligence where we're able to optimize core systems. And in some parts of our industry like mining, I'll call out leverage more and more robotics for greater automation in certain parts of our value chain today that are dangerous and where we're having trouble bringing in new workforce enabling that next capability from asset automation, asset advisory into our operators and in some cases especially remote and challenging and high risk parts of the value chain where we're able to leverage AI and robotics. So that's a big chunk. But last but not least, and I want to pull on some of Satya's remarks at Davos, the fourth element is reshaping business process. And what Satya shared at Davos and what is so important for us to be thinking about as organizational leaders, applying AI on top of existing business process will only get you so far. The big unlock will come from rethinking our business processes about how we would redesign end to end workflows of things like supply chain, like field service and supporting frontline workers. Even of that intelligent asset string I just started talking about how would we redesign the patterns of how our people are working and the tooling they're using if we stood back and rethought them in light of AI and that business process rethink. This is where enterprises are digging in right now. And it does require a new type of strategic leadership from the executive level because it's culture, it's people and culture on that element much more than just the technology.
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It's interesting because I can relate to what you're saying even in my own job. And of course we use some of Microsoft tools like Copilot and you know how you have to change the way you behave. And we have an initiative actually about what we call researcher of the future. Just the way you are describing changing the business process or research can be considered a business or analysis business process. So how do we change that? And that's kind of an interesting journey. I'm glad to hear from you that you're helping other companies do that. So what are the some of the changes you think are necessary for companies in their processes, partnerships and behaviors to get the maximum value? Since you have done so many of these, you can perhaps Tell our audience what are the things people should be watching for?
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It's such a good question, Atul. And it is a conversation that my team and I love to have with our partners and energy because we're drinking out of the fire hose too. I mean, we are every day rethinking our own processes and how we leverage our own AI capabilities. And so my first message is, don't go it alone. Nobody is going to lead your market and lead execution with your AI strategy by thinking about it in a silo. The first thing is don't go it alone. You have partners, Chances are Microsoft is a technology partner of yours. You also have core partners who you rely on for, let's say some of your applications in intelligent assets, an intelligent field, your GIS partners. Pull them in, ask them to work together, think about your ecosystem, who you count on to run your business with and alongside. Get to know what they're doing with AI, what's on their roadmap, what's in their strategy. Be bold. Expose your strategy to us. Help us work with you and for you by knowing what you want to accomplish so that we can advise and support you. I would say the companies that I'm seeing really lead are changing the conversation, pulling in their partners close and saying, this is what I want to get done. How can you help me do it? Where I see companies struggling, it's where they've sort of gone towards an app based approach. An app here, an app there, and it feels very piecemeal and it can feel very noisy at all layers of the organization. And so taking that moment and saying, here's what we want to accomplish, we don't have an AI strategy, we have a strategy. And then here's where we're going to drive AI to deliver on that strategy. And here's where we need our partners to help support us and make that happen. So don't go it alone. Make AI part of your core strategy, not an R and D project. And people, I would also say two more big pieces. The second is don't wait. The time for studying is over. It is the time to deliver and scale. And the third is bet on your people. There can be an impulse to ask others to tell you all the use cases that you need. And I would say that my experience working with oil and gas companies, working with power and utilities companies, working with our partners around the world, world, our talent is so exceptional, they are so deep in their subject matter. They know this industry and their own piece of it in such depth that they are already thinking about where they want to apply AI to their own daily tasks, to what you've asked them to deliver on. So tap into that talent and that knowledge in your people. Give them AI tooling. Set them up with copilot. Of course you need responsible AI and clear governance in place for how you want AI to be used and useful within your organization. But give your people tools, give them space and ask them to tell you their vision for how they can deliver outcomes in your enterprise with AI, because they are full of good ideas.
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What I take away from you, Hannah, is that think about this in a holistic way, right? And don't think about here is my AI strategy and here's my company strategy. It's all together, right? It needs to be one strategy where AI is key part of your actions, your operations, your thinking. Very good that you have been able to share with us many of your examples and what you're doing inside Microsoft, but also what you're doing with your customers. To wrap up, what are you looking forward to at the Shaila Week in Houston in March?
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I always look forward to reconnecting. The relationships in this industry are important. They are valuable. And I always look forward to listening, listening to this key session and the conversations that you and Dan and Lou and others have on stage. I want to listen and hear where companies are in this journey. I like to listen to what's working at scale, especially because this is the year of execution, not ambition. What's working. I also really like to hear what's not working because we all learn a lot more from our peers, from our competitors, from our partners, when we know what's not working because we're going to see those patterns and understand more on both sides of that. I am also really curious to see this next phase of evolution around IEA calls the age of Electricity. The IEA has said we are now in the age of electricity to deliver on this broader need for more energy around the world with greater affordability, with greater resilience. How are utilities and retail companies, but also oil and gas companies, positioning in that who do they want to be in five years? I'm really eager to hear that evolution of that conversation at this year's Sarah Week.
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The couple of messages I take away and our audience should take away is this is the year of execution and year of action. So it'd be great to hear and see where the action is and how are companies wrestling with this kind of, what I call a warp speed of change. There is change everywhere in many different ways. There is geopolitical change, technological changes. So how are they putting it all together? And that's why we're calling it convergence and Competition. I know our audience can't see you, but we're pointing at something I loved
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when I saw this year's theme around around convergence and what you're calling sort of the waterfall of change. I keep a framed picture on my office wall behind me and it says change is just the way things are. I see that every morning when I walk into my office and it feels deeply true. As we go into this year's Sarah Week, it is a time of change. It will be a time of change. And I I think the winners are those that are leaning into it and taking a step back and thinking about how they want to lead through change and make change part of that strategy.
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As somebody well known said long time back, be the change you want to be. So that's the conversation we want to have. Hannah Green, Global Go to Market and Innovation Leader at Microsoft Global Energy and Resources Team thank you for joining us for Sarah Wikip Podcast today and we look forward to seeing you in Houston.
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Thank you. See you in Houston.
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Thank you for joining us on the Sarah Week Podcast to stay connected with the ideas driving change across energy and technology. Subscribe, share and rate this episode. It helps us get the word out. Let's continue having impactful conversations. I'm Atul Arya. Until the next time, the Sarah Week
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Podcast with Atul Aria is brought to you by saraweek, the world's premier energy conference. Be part of the conversations moving the world of Energy Forward, March 23 27, 2026 in Houston. Discover more@Sarah Week.com.