Energy Resilience Needs to Be Fuelled By Deep Tech

The power outages felt this week across the Iberian Peninsula, following recent disruptions at Heathrow Airport and the storms in late 2024/early 2025, highlight the importance and growing need for resilience in our energy networks. These events illustrate the pressing need for robust energy systems capable of withstanding both environmental challenges and technical failures. Resilience means many things to different groups, some of the main focuses, challenges and solutions are discussed below.

Flexibility Is Key

Resilience requires flexibility—particularly in how and when energy is consumed. As renewable sources like wind and solar become dominant, the intermittency of these supplies necessitates reliable energy storage. Technologies such as grid-scale batteries/long term storage, hydrogen fuel cells, and gravity storage systems are becoming vital components of modern networks.

But storage alone is not enough—Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are emerging as a critical tool in modern grid resilience. VPPs aggregate distributed energy resources such as solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and flexible loads, enabling them to operate collectively like a traditional power plant. This allows grid operators to respond dynamically to fluctuations in demand and generation, while also improving local energy resilience.

By combining intelligent storage with VPPs, we can build energy systems that are not only more sustainable, but more robust and agile in the face of disruption. Such systems require the participation of the many, not the few, given the nature of the distributed technologies, so the societal factors need to be explored and understood, as detailed in this report.

Effective Monitoring Keeps Our Old Assets Delivering

Energy networks across Europe are, in most cases, not more than 100 years old and were originally designed for large, centralised, dispatchable power plants and unidirectional power flows. The energy sector in 2025 looks very different and so extra attention is required to ensure that the infrastructure that we have is optimised to work as effectively as possible.

By using real-time data and advanced diagnostics, operators can detect faults early, optimise load balancing, and prevent outages, ensuring continuity and stability across the network. This not only improves grid reliability but also enables the integration of more low-carbon technologies without costly infrastructure upgrades.

Climate Change Needs Adaptation Plans

The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events—driven by climate change—pose a significant threat to energy infrastructure. Flooding, wildfires, and storms can damage transmission lines, substations, and generation facilities, often in unpredictable ways. The UK’s 2022 winter storms, where the winds came from the north rather than the west, left tens of thousands without power for days, exposing the fragility of the grid in the face of environmental extremes. Resilience, therefore, must include adaptation strategies such as hardening physical assets, decentralising energy generation, and predictive maintenance using data analytics.

Cybersecurity Must Evolve

Cybersecurity is no longer a peripheral concern for the energy sector—it is a front-line defence. The rise of connected energy systems introduces new attack surfaces, requiring sophisticated countermeasures. New threats, driven by the development of quantum computing, may render current encryption standards obsolete.

Emerging quantum computing technology will open significant new attack vectors against existing cybersecurity. At Cambridge Consultants, we’ve been collaborating with the UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO), the University of Edinburgh and the University of Warwick to design a new framework to evaluate the quantum threat and methodology to generate timescale estimates and readiness indicators, enabling appropriate mitigation strategies and supporting resilience across the energy industry.

The task is not just to establish effective mitigation, but to provide ways for the energy industry to understand how and when it needs to act to ensure that assets and energy flows remain secure. So, this is as much about value for customers and operational efficiency as it is about societal good and national security.

Deep Tech for a Smarter, Stronger Grid

Deep tech can transform the energy landscape.  forecasting tools can anticipate peak loads and weather disruptions, while sensors enable real-time monitoring of critical infrastructure. Startups are also deploying digital twins of entire grid systems to simulate stress scenarios and optimise resilience planning.

As the threats to energy infrastructure multiply, so too must our investment in resilient, tech-enabled solutions. With the right combination of innovation, foresight, and infrastructure modernisation, energy networks can be fortified to withstand both natural and man-made disruptions—ensuring stable, secure power for generations to come.

At Cambridge Consultants, we focus on: 

1. Novel connectivity and interoperability platforms, both before and behind the meter, and agentic AI enabled data analysis insight to help individuals, communities and operators of the grid to better manage supply and demand peaks.
2. Enabling DNOs/EDCs to optimise performance, reduce maintenance costs and improve response times with advanced hardware, sensing technologies, and data processing algorithms
3. Refining and scaling novel physical and digital technology solutions to improve grid resilience through intelligent monitoring

If there are any aspects of the topic you’d like to explore in more detail, please contact me. I’d be happy to continue the conversation.