Arguing for a complex adaptive power grid

The grid is in crisis. A century-old system for generating, distributing, and regulating electricity cannot cope with coinciding pressures of electrification, decarbonization, enormous demand from data centers, and grid technology updates such as digitalization and artificial intelligence. Even the supply chain is faltering.

“If you want to build a new gas-fired power plant to serve the data center going in down the street, it’s going to take you seven years just to get the turbine,” says SFI External Professor Lynne Kiesling (Northwestern University).

To address the grid’s overarching challenges, Kiesling helped organize a working group at SFI on “Converging Technologies, Diverging Institutions: Bridging Governance for the Grid and the Grid’s Edge,” held February 19–25.

Building on an April 2025 meeting focused on grid governance, the working group assembled participants from academia, law, industry, and public policy to discuss how technology is upending old ways of managing energy.

For example, the grid once ended at your home electric meter. Now it’s acquired a fuzzy edge: third-party extensions like electric vehicles and rooftop solar panels have introduced new actors to the electricity market, plus the chance for significant consumer control.

“Emerging actors in the U.S. grid are almost like new kids in class. We don’t know where they should sit! Right now, the popular kids get to decide. The world is evolving, but those traditional grid decision-makers want to hold onto their power and follow the same rules they always have,” says Kiesling.

Local working-group participants shared examples of this clash between new actors and old systems in New Mexico. A private equity group is seeking to buy the state’s biggest utility, presenting unexpected challenges and opportunities for regulators. Santa Fe-based Microgrid Systems Laboratory is experimenting with innovations on the grid’s edge (such as storing electricity at your home, or developing microgrids operated by Indigenous communities) — proving it’s possible to reduce rigid hierarchy in energy decision-making.

“Traditionally, grid problem-solving has been piecemeal: people’s electric bills go up, and we laser-focus on fixing one specific part of the system,” says SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack (Pennsylvania State University), working group co-organizer. “But in this moment of deep structural change for the grid, piecemeal solutions aren’t enough. At the working group, we tried to zoom out and say, how is the grid system organized as a whole? How can we address whole-systems problems?”

A complex-adaptive-systems approach can avoid the pitfalls of the piecemeal. Working-group participants considered foundational complexity concepts like SFI External Professor Brian Arthur’s recombination as it relates to innovation, and Stuart Kauffman’s fitness landscape applied to regulation.

“What does a research agenda for a ‘complex adaptive grid’ really look like?” Blumsack asks, borrowing a phrase from Microgrid Systems Laboratory’s David Breecker. To hash out such an agenda, more than a dozen researchers and practitioners have agreed to continue meeting and are preparing a journal commentary paper.

“Using the complex-systems approach, we want to introduce practitioners to new ways of thinking about stuff they’ve been doing every day for decades. We hope that encourages them to make regulatory changes that would create a more resilient, adaptive grid,” says Kiesling.

This meeting received support from SFI’s Emergent Engineering theme (which is sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant #81366) and Emergent Political Economies program.