There is a version of energy strategy that most companies are still running: lock in a rate, budget the expense, wait for the bill. It worked when energy was stable enough to treat as a fixed cost. It is not working now, and the organizations that have not updated their approach are carrying exposure they have not priced.
Verdantix, an independent market research and advisory firm, surveyed 350 corporate energy leaders across commercial and industrial sectors globally in early 2026. The results, presented at a webinar on June 10, describe a market where the pressures on energy strategy have multiplied faster than most organizations have adapted. Energy price volatility ranked as the top obstacle for the first time in the survey's history, cited by 53% of respondents as either their number one challenge or highly challenging. Cost of capital, which had held that position in prior years, dropped behind it.
The reasons are not hard to find. Connor Taylor, Principal Analyst at Verdantix, pointed to two geopolitical disruptions in the past six years that each forced a round of strategic rethinking, neither of which produced durable changes in how most organizations manage energy risk. Russia and Ukraine reshaped European natural gas markets virtually overnight. Middle East tension has kept oil price forecasts unreliable. The pattern Taylor described is a tipping point cycle: something goes wrong, companies respond intensively for a year or two, then drift back toward the assumption that things will stabilize. "Organizations need to get out of the belief that everything's going to stabilize again," he said. The intervals between disruptions have not been long enough to justify that belief, and the next one does not wait for readiness.
Grid Instability Is Not a Reliability Problem. It Is an Operating Cost Problem.
Behind price volatility in the Verdantix survey, 32% of respondents flagged grid instability as a top or highly challenging concern, and the trajectory of that number is more important than the figure itself. Two structural forces are loading the grid simultaneously. AI and data center demand is arriving faster than transmission infrastructure can absorb it, and a significant share of that load has not yet come online. As John Sullivan, a CFO with direct experience managing energy across large multi-facility portfolios, noted during the webinar: "A lot of these data centers are still under construction and haven't come online. There's an interesting point in the future when these facilities become operational."
At the same time, rising renewable penetration is introducing frequency instability that older grid architecture was not designed to handle. Taylor pointed to Spain's April 2025 blackout, where excess solar power overwhelmed frequency controls and knocked out power for three days, as a concrete example of where that goes at scale. For a facilities or operations team, grid instability does not present as an abstract infrastructure concern. It shows up as demand charge spikes, voltage events, and unplanned downtime with a direct P&L consequence. Sullivan was direct about the boardroom implication: "If you're manufacturing something and you go down, that's a revenue event. It impacts your margins."
Most Companies Have a Resilience Strategy. None of Them Are Publishing It.
The Verdantix survey found that 61% of energy leaders report having a formalized energy resilience strategy, a figure two to three times higher than when the firm asked a comparable question in prior years. Taylor's challenge to the webinar audience landed with some force: go try to find a published resilience strategy from any listed company. You will not find one. The work is happening internally, framed as operational continuity or capital planning, because publishing it requires disclosing where operations are exposed. Most organizations are not doing that voluntarily.
The practical implication for anyone benchmarking against peers is that absence of public documentation is not evidence of inaction. In a separate Verdantix study in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector, approximately 65% of the energy interventions companies publicly disclosed were, on closer examination, primarily about resilience and operational continuity. The public framing was efficiency and renewables. The capital was going somewhere else. The competitive gap that matters is not between what organizations are announcing. It is between what they are building and what their peers have not started yet.
Efficiency First, Then Generation. The Sequencing Is Not Arbitrary.
Fifty-nine percent of survey respondents said they are highly likely to increase energy efficiency, making it the top site-level investment priority. Part of the logic is straightforward cost management. But Sullivan pointed to a dimension that gets less attention: energy efficiency has the cleanest permitting pathway of any energy investment category. Unlike grid-connected generation or battery storage, efficiency projects do not carry interconnection queue risk or open-ended regulatory review timelines. In a capital environment where permitting delays are compressing project schedules and introducing financing uncertainty, that sequencing advantage is real. "Efficiency will get there more rapidly than potentially the other two," Sullivan said, referring to generation and storage investments that should run in parallel but will deliver results on a longer timeline.
The harder problem, Taylor noted, is not whether to invest in efficiency but knowing which facility, which upgrade, and when. Smart lighting has roughly 80% adoption among the organizations Verdantix surveys. Deployment falls sharply from there down to heat pumps and deeper operational upgrades that require meaningful capital and careful timing against asset replacement cycles. For organizations managing broad portfolios, the governance question is genuinely cross-functional: facilities teams, maintenance teams, and procurement teams each own part of the picture. Without a coordinated roadmap, the easy wins get done and the harder ones get deferred indefinitely. "Building a governance strategy to deal with that," Taylor said, "is one of the best things firms can do." Most have not built it.
The Rate Structure Change That Is Not in Anyone's Current Budget
Sullivan closed with an observation worth sitting with. In the U.S., utility rate increases have historically landed disproportionately on residential customers because residents are voters and commercial customers are not. That dynamic is changing. As utilities seek to recover the cost of grid upgrades, transmission investment, and reliability infrastructure, commercial customers with low demand and no flexibility capability may find themselves absorbing more of the burden than their current rate agreements imply. The organizations that have already built demand response capability, on-site generation, and load flexibility will have options when that shift arrives. The ones still treating energy as a stable line item are building five-year plans against a number that the rate environment may not support.
