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Energy in the room: Insights from Marsh Risk’s North American Energy Industry Conference

Energy risk is cutting across silos and uniting industries around three urgent realities: digital demand, diversified assets, and a deepening talent crunch.
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By Michael Kolodner , 

Managing Director, Energy & Power, Marsh Risk

02/20/2026 · 4 minute read

Energy risk is cutting across silos and uniting industries around three urgent realities: digital demand, diversified assets, and a deepening talent crunch. Now with an expanded focus, the 2026 Marsh Risk North American Energy Industry Conference brought a broader mix of stakeholders than ever before, from construction and digital‑infrastructure leaders to representatives from mining, minerals, and traditional power sectors. This diversity reflected a simple reality: energy is top of mind across industries. 

Today’s energy landscape is an interconnected ecosystem shaped by geopolitical dynamics and the rapid growth of AI and data centers. Conferences like this create a “wide tent,” crossing traditional industry boundaries and bringing together a multitude of stakeholders engaged in energy risk. Attendees appreciated the opportunity to collaborate, debate opportunities, and consider how to confront shared challenges together.

Three themes extend beyond the main stage, highlighting priorities for risk managers and insurers to turn insight into action.

AI and digital infrastructure: Opportunity brings exposure

AI and digital infrastructure dominated the agenda, appearing in nearly every session. Data centers could consume anywhere between 4.6% and 9.1% of all US electricity consumption by 2030, reshaping the landscape significantly.

The sentiment was overwhelmingly optimistic. Many organizations see this as a generational opportunity, marked by massive growth and the chance to power the defining technologies of our era. Investment in each data center implies corresponding expansions in power plants, grid capacity, and network infrastructure. 

At a roundtable with utilities, generators, hyperscalers, and major data‑center developers, there was consensus that energy is the number one issue for digital infrastructure.

For off‑takers, the concern is supply reliability; for providers, it is business interruption exposure. Unlike traditional energy‑intensive users, data centers operate without ceilings on economic output per unit of power. Hyperscalers are signing long‑term power purchase agreements (PPAs) at multiples of wholesale power prices, valuing guaranteed supply. This premium, combined with supply‑demand imbalances, is driving exposures higher than many anticipated. Failure to supply and interruption risks are potentially greater than many had realized.

While insurance markets are beginning to respond with increased line sizes and new products addressing converged risks, many traditional insurance programs were not designed for this digital‑energy intersection. Early engagement with risk advisors is crucial to model scenarios, test assumptions, and design safeguards.

A broader asset mix means more complex risk strategies

Rising demand from data centers and electrification is driving capital toward a wider range of technologies: gas‑fired generation, conventional and modular nuclear, and the networks needed to balance them.

This is not an abandonment of renewables, but rather an “all tools available” moment. For risk managers, this means revisiting asset types that may have been dormant for years, following cycles focused primarily on renewables. Many project teams are confronting knowledge gaps around the construction and operational risks for new, large‑scale emerging technologies. 

Small modular reactors (SMRs) illustrate this shift, with the first North American units entering the market and more in development. Battery storage remains vital, especially behind-the-meter at data centers to mitigate supply failures. Meanwhile, US natural‑gas infrastructure, from LNG export terminals to transmission networks, is playing a bigger role in domestic and international energy security.

Permitted sites with grid connections, whether new or suitable for repowering, have become highly valuable assets. This diversification requires equally flexible risk strategies. Organizations are increasingly focused on blended portfolios, interconnection exposure, and project‑timeline risk to develop insurance programs that keep pace with evolving technology and capital flows.

The talent crunch

The final theme, the human element, proved fundamental, surfacing in two key areas: the availability and location of skilled labor to deliver much-needed infrastructure, and the expertise to manage complex risk exposures.

First, the infrastructure now being planned — vast data centers with co-located energy facilities — often reside in remote areas with plenty of land but often little grid or workforce capacity. Skilled trades and technical staff typically cluster near existing facilities and hiring has been subdued in recent years. The result is both a widening skills gap and a geographic misalignment amid surging demand.

Many organizations are already feeling the pressure. Multi‑year construction timelines can make labor costs hard to forecast, and as projects compete for the same workers, unexpected cost escalation looms. That raises the possibility of delays, budget overruns, and delay‑in‑start‑up exposures.

Second, risk professionals are increasingly confronted with new or unfamiliar asset classes that are growing in complexity. The rapid pace of innovation and the interconnected global environment continue to introduce new risk profiles that require fresh skill sets, training, and knowledge at scale. 

Organizations are actively pursuing solutions to promote workforce continuity, streamline training and knowledge transfer, and adopt innovative approaches to risk management in a landscape shaped by both legacy systems and emerging technologies.

Understanding risk in a new energy era

Across these themes — digital transformation, capital diversification, and people — the energy industry is collectively entering a new risk lifecycle phase. 

By convening stakeholders from different disciplines, we can learn from each other: building quantitative models of existing and emerging exposures, leveraging broader data sets, and running scenario analyses to see how new revenue models and asset combinations behave under stress. This work helps to deepen our understanding of how value is created, how it can be interrupted, and how those findings translate into more effective program structures and policy wordings.

The year 2026 will help define the energy risk patterns of the next decade. Organizations that grasp how the energy ecosystem is evolving and invest in understanding and managing the associated risks will be better positioned to make smarter decisions and capture the opportunities ahead with confidence. 

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