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The IEA Electricity 2026 report highlights a defining trend: global electricity demand is set to grow rapidly through 2030 as electrification accelerates across industry, transport and buildings — with data centres, EV fleets and heat pumps all playing a role.

At the same time, renewable generation is scaling fast, grid congestion is emerging as a bottleneck, and system resilience is being tested by extreme events and increasing complexity.

📊 Key IEA Electricity 2026 Insights

⚡ 1. Strong and Sustained Growth in Electricity Demand

IEA forecasts that global electricity demand will grow by ~3.6% per year through 2030, driven by industry electrification, EV adoption, heat pumps, data centres and AI-related loads. Demand growth is outpacing economic growth for the first time in decades.

How Electrex can help:
As electricity use expands, visibility into energy flows, dynamic loads, peaks, and transients becomes essential for managing cost, reliability, and efficiency.

🔄 2. Renewables and Low-Emissions Generation Scaling Fast

Renewables are rapidly expanding — with solar PV alone accounting for a major share of new generation — and by 2030 solar, wind, nuclear and hydro are expected to provide about half of global electricity.

How Electrex can help:
High penetration of renewables introduces variability and power quality challenges (harmonics, voltage fluctuations, imbalance) that advanced monitoring and PQ analysis can detect and help manage.

🧠 3. Grid Congestion, Queue Backlogs, and Flexibility Needs

The report highlights that grid infrastructure investment lags generation and demand growth, leading to congestion, curtailment, and long queues for interconnection. Making better use of existing grids — through flexibility and grid-enhancing technologies — is essential.

How Electrex can help:
System integrators, grid operators, and industrial sites need accurate distributed monitoring + power quality analysis to identify bottlenecks and manage flexibility solutions (demand response, intelligent controllers, PQ-driven automation).

🛡️ 4. Security, Resilience, and Reliability Are Priorities

The IEA report underscores a rising need for secure, resilient power systems due to aging infrastructure, extreme weather, cyber threats, and operational complexity. Advanced monitoring and early-detection systems are cited as critical for reducing outage risk.

How Electrex can help:
High-resolution PQ and event detection are key components of early warning and diagnostic systems that enhance resilience.

🔍 What This Means for Monitoring, Power Quality & Flexibility

📈 Trend: Demand Growth + Renewables Integration

• Higher loads with more variable generation stress grid performance.

• Demand growth from EV charging, data centres, heat pumps complicates load profiles.

How Electrex can help:

Monitoring need: finer resolution of loads and power quality to avoid imbalances and quality degradation.

🔁 Trend: Grid Flexibility & Congestion

• Higher variability and congestion require flexible management of loads/generation.

• Intermittent VR-grid output complicates stability.

How Electrex can help:

Monitoring need: fast event detection, harmonic and waveform analysis, correlation with control actions.

🔐 Trend: Security & Resilience

• Avoiding blackouts and maintaining reliability demands advanced system observability and diagnostics.

How Electrex can help:

Monitoring need: power quality events that signal emerging instability or grid stress.

📌 How Electrex Solutions Tie In

Electrex monitoring and control solutions — including advanced Power Quality Analyzers — directly support these emerging needs:

✔︎ Power Quality & Stability

• Phasor (vector) diagrams capture phase relationships essential for imbalance and voltage stability diagnostics.

• Harmonic spectra up to 51st order allows detailed detection of distortion from inverter-dominated systems.

• Waveform capture supports in-depth transient analysis during demand spikes or renewable variability.

• Event-triggered recording isolates critical moments — lightning, load switching, grid perturbations — for root-cause analysis.

These features help detect issues early and provide actionable insight for grid operators, integrators, and industrial sites.

✔︎ Observability as a Basis for Flexibility

Distributed Electrex monitoring tools deliver fine-grained data that can be correlated across sites and systems, forming the foundation for:

• Demand response strategies

• PQ-based automation

• Hosting capacity optimisation

• Grid-enhancing technology integration

✔︎ Resilience & Reliability

Remote logging, event summaries, high-resolution measurement and integration with control systems (e.g., PPC / Libra CCI) allow both visibility and response during abnormal conditions — supporting security of supply.

📩 Let’s Talk

If you’re working with renewables, industrial electrification or advanced electrified loads and want monitoring that truly supports flexibility, security and efficiency — let’s connect.

Monitoring isn’t just about visibility anymore — it’s about intelligence and action.

Contact me to schedule a call! I will be glad to answer any questions you may have.

About us

Since 1993 Electrex designs, develops, manufactures and markets, Made in Italy, instruments and software for energy  management and control.

The Electrex solutions are used in the Energy Efficiency and Energy Automation applications, for the industrial, commercial, public, civil, and renewable energy sectors allowing a rapid return on investment.

The solutions provided up to now allow the management of over 560,000 measuring points and more than 1,020,000 points are controlled via Energy Automation applications.

Electrex, one of the first companies to operate in these sectors, has acquired over the years a considerable experience and competence that few other companies can claim to have. With over 40% of the staff dedicated to R & D, we demonstrate our strong commitment to innovation and continuous improvement in order to anticipate the needs of our customers.