IN Brief:
- ABB's whitepaper argues that industrial electrical infrastructure is moving from connected assets towards coordinated real-time operation.
- Its research puts energy at 25.4% of industrial operating costs and reports widespread concern over rising prices and outages.
- AI, storage, digital asset management, and outcome-based service models feature in ABB's outlook to 2035 and beyond.
Industrial electrical infrastructure is likely to move from individually connected assets towards systems in which generation, storage, loads, condition data, and maintenance decisions are coordinated more actively, according to a new whitepaper from ABB.
The Future of Electrification Service 2026–2035+ report describes that development as power orchestration, with electrical assets, energy flows, and technical expertise managed dynamically rather than operated as largely separate systems. ABB links the transition to rising electricity demand, grid constraints, ageing infrastructure, digitalisation, and the financial consequences of outages.
The company’s research puts energy at 25.4% of industrial operating costs among the organisations examined, with 59% identifying rising energy prices as a major threat. ABB also cites an estimated $1.4 trillion annual cost of unplanned downtime among the world’s largest companies and reports that 69% of industrial plants experience outages at least monthly.
Those are ABB’s whitepaper findings rather than universal industrial benchmarks, but they reflect the way electrical infrastructure can influence production far beyond its direct maintenance budget. Failure of a transformer, switchboard, protection device, busbar, drive, control-power supply, or other relatively small part of the distribution chain can stop production equipment whose lost output is worth substantially more than the failed electrical component.
The report also identifies a gap between how companies say capital expenditure should be assessed and how it is handled in practice. ABB says 81% of senior decision-makers believe total cost of ownership should guide capital decisions, while only 37% apply it consistently.
Total cost of ownership is particularly relevant to electrical equipment because purchase price is only one part of the asset’s economic life. Energy losses, maintenance, spares, inspections, downtime exposure, software support, obsolescence, upgrade requirements, and eventual replacement can outweigh modest differences in initial equipment cost.
ABB’s power-orchestration argument extends that assessment from individual assets to the wider site. A factory with local solar generation, battery storage, EV charging, large process loads, standby generation, and a constrained network connection has several systems capable of affecting the same electricity demand profile.
Operating those assets independently can create unnecessary peaks or leave useful flexibility idle. Coordinated controls can instead schedule batteries, discretionary loads, local generation, and other resources around production requirements and the electrical limits of the site, provided operational priorities remain clear.
Industrial power systems are also becoming more bidirectional. Conventional distribution architectures were primarily designed to move electricity from the grid through transformers and switchgear towards passive loads. Distributed generation and storage increasingly allow sites to import, export, store, and internally redistribute energy, placing additional requirements on protection, metering, power quality, and control.
The whitepaper expects AI, automation, and digital asset-management tools to take a larger role through 2035. Condition monitoring already allows maintenance teams to identify deteriorating equipment, while combining condition data with production schedules and energy information could help determine when maintenance can be performed with the least operational disruption.
Digital intelligence does not remove conventional engineering dependencies. Recommendations are only as useful as the sensors, protection settings, asset records, communications, and maintenance data beneath them. An inaccurate asset model or unreliable measurement can allow software to make a poor assumption more quickly rather than improving plant reliability.
Storage is one of five immediate pathways identified by ABB. Industrial batteries can support peak shaving, renewable-energy utilisation, backup functions, tariff optimisation, and flexibility markets, but those uses can compete for the same stored energy. A battery held near full charge for resilience has less capacity available to absorb excess on-site generation, while intensive market cycling can reduce the reserve available during an outage.
The company also expects service models to move from equipment ownership and scheduled maintenance towards agreements centred more directly on uptime, resilience, and performance. That changes the commercial conversation from how frequently an engineer visits a site to the operating results expected from the electrical system.
ABB has already been expanding its reach around that wider energy-management model. Its investment and partnership with LevelTen added clean-energy procurement to a portfolio spanning electrification, energy management, and advisory services, illustrating how electrical infrastructure decisions are becoming linked with electricity sourcing as well as physical equipment.
Organisational boundaries may be harder to change than the technology. Electrical assets can sit with engineering teams, energy contracts with procurement, production schedules with operations, cybersecurity with IT or OT teams, and investment approval with finance. Coordinating the physical power system requires those decisions to exchange reliable data without allowing one department’s target to undermine another’s operating requirement.
Cybersecurity becomes part of the same reliability problem as more switchgear, meters, relays, drives, batteries, and control platforms are connected to operational networks. Greater connectivity improves visibility and remote service capability, but it also creates additional systems that require controlled access, network segmentation, patch management, monitoring, and recovery planning.
ABB’s five proposed pathways — strategic asset management, AI and digital solutions, energy storage, energy and carbon services, and advisory services — cover a broad range of technologies and commercial activities. The common thread is that electrical infrastructure is becoming increasingly intertwined with production, market exposure, and operating risk.
Most industrial sites will make that transition incrementally because switchgear, transformers, cables, and plant distribution systems often remain in service for decades. The practical measure of orchestration will therefore be how effectively companies can add monitoring, controls, storage, and better maintenance intelligence around existing equipment without weakening protection or reliability — less dramatic than wholesale replacement, but considerably more useful when the objective is to keep production running.
