By John RyanMANAGING DIRECTOR | PRACTICE LEADERThe grid is being asked to do more than it ever has, and the leaders who know how to run it are heading for the door at the same time. Goldman Sachs projects U.S. data center power demand will roughly double to 66 gigawatts in 2027, up from 31 gigawatts in 2025, as the AI buildout accelerates.
Meanwhile, the people who design, build, and operate that infrastructure are aging out. The International Energy Agency reports that in advanced economies there are now 2.4 energy workers nearing retirement for every new entrant under 25.
That combination puts a quiet but serious risk on every board agenda. Demand is climbing, and leadership depth is thinning.
Power infrastructure succession planning is how you close that gap before it becomes a crisis, and it deserves the same rigor you bring to capital planning and grid reliability.
Succession planning has always mattered. What has changed is the speed and the stakes.
A single retirement in a leadership-critical role, a VP of grid operations, a head of substation engineering, a data center site leader, can stall a project for months while you search for a replacement under pressure. Power constraints are already extending some data center construction timelines, and a leadership vacancy on top of that only compounds the delay.
The challenge is also broad. The U.S.
Census Bureau found that the share of utilities-sector employment at firms where at least a quarter of workers are over 55 climbed from 35 percent in 2006 to 80 percent in 2022. This is not a problem isolated to one team or one specialty.
It runs across the organization, which means your succession plan has to as well.
Effective power infrastructure succession planning begins with clarity about which roles actually carry the organization. These are rarely just the titles at the top of the org chart.
They are the positions where deep technical knowledge, regulatory fluency, and relationships converge, and where a sudden gap would create real operational or safety risk.
Work with your practice leaders to identify these roles directly. For each one, name the likely retirement window, the specialized knowledge that would walk out the door, and the internal candidates who could step up with the right development.
This map becomes the foundation everything else is built on.
The most common mistake is treating succession as an event rather than a process. Naming a successor the week someone announces their departure is not a plan.
It is a reaction.
Building a real pipeline means identifying high-potential leaders years ahead and giving them the exposure that prepares them: stretch assignments, cross-functional projects, time in front of the board, and mentorship from the very leaders they may one day replace. There are real benefits to promoting leaders from within, from continuity to retention, but those benefits only materialize when the development starts early.
In a sector where technical mastery takes a decade to develop, this runway is not a luxury. It is the difference between a smooth transition and a scramble.
Technical credentials are easy to verify. The harder question is whether a candidate can think and plan quickly, act decisively, and intuitively understand the role culture plays in driving results.
We call this Cultural Leadership, and it is often what separates a capable engineer from a leader who can carry a power infrastructure organization through a period of intense growth and change.
Assessment tools have a place here, but they work best as one input among several, used to confirm and sharpen judgment rather than replace it. The goal is to understand how a leader will perform inside your specific culture and strategy, not simply to score them against a generic benchmark.
Even the strongest internal pipeline will have gaps, and that is normal. The fastest-growing parts of the sector, data centers and large-scale power infrastructure among them, are competing for a finite pool of proven leaders.
What many data center boards and CHROs get wrong is treating succession as a future task, then conducting an emergency search under the worst possible conditions. When a critical role cannot be filled from within, an external executive leadership search gives you access to candidates your network would never surface on its own.
The two approaches are partners, not alternatives. Internal development builds continuity and rewards your best people.
A disciplined external search, grounded in a process like our proprietary Orxestra® method, ensures you are never forced to promote before someone is ready simply because the bench ran dry. Together they keep the leadership pipeline full from both directions.
A succession plan written once and filed away ages badly. Roles change, leaders develop at different rates, and the demands on the grid keep shifting.
It is worth taking time to rethink succession as the strategic process it is, then revisiting the plan at least annually with your board and leadership team. Treat the integration of each new leader as a deliberate step, tying their early priorities to strategic goals and clear measures of success so they are aligned from day one.
The organizations that handle leadership transitions well are not the ones that got lucky. They are the ones that planned, developed their people with intention, and never let the pipeline run empty.
Building leadership depth in power infrastructure is too important to leave to chance. TRANSEARCH partners with utilities, energy, and data center organizations to identify the roles that matter most and place leaders who excel inside your culture and strategy.
If you are thinking about the next generation of leadership for your organization, schedule a conversation with John Ryan, our Global Practice Leader for Power and Energy.
It is the structured process of identifying leadership-critical roles across a power, energy, or data center organization, developing internal candidates to fill them, and securing external leaders when needed, so the organization is never left exposed by a retirement or sudden departure.
Demand is surging while the workforce ages. Data center power demand is projected to roughly double by 2027, and a large share of the experienced energy workforce is at or near retirement, creating a widening gap between the leadership the sector needs and the leadership it has.
Years before you expect the vacancy. Technical and leadership mastery in this sector takes time to develop, so the earlier you identify and grow high-potential leaders, the smoother the eventual transition will be.
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