1
Executive Summary | The U.S. utility sector faces twin pressures: decarbonization mandates and grid resilience. VSI's 2025 Energy-IT Benchmark surveyed 83 utilities (collectively serving 154 M meters). Key findings: 61 % of substations still operate <2012 SCADA firmware; Outage MTTR is 2.8x higher for "fragmented-cloud" operators; 90 % plan OT/IT convergence, yet only 12 % have zero-trust blueprints. 2 Methodology | Data collection via secure Io
T agents, CMDB APIs, and CIO workshops (Jan-Apr 2025). Framework mapped maturity across 35 controls: Cyber, Cloud, Data, ESG, Workforce. 3 Key Gaps &
Risks Legacy Protocol Debt –
- DNP3 without encryption. Islands of Cloud –
- 4 separate Saa
S silos per utility. Talent Imbalance –
- OT engineers retiring 4x faster than replenishment. 4 VSI Action Plan Phase 0
- Rapid Baseline (30 days)
- digital twin of assets; attack-surface scan. Phase 1
- Zero-Trust Core (90 days)
- micro-segmented SD-WAN, identity for humans & sensors. Phase 2
- AI Ops & DER Orchestration (6 mo)
- Graph AI forecasts, EV load balancing, solar curtail. Phase 3
- ESG & Fin
Ops (12 mo)
- carbon dashboards, cloud rightsizing (avg 15 % Op
Ex cut). 5 Business Case Projected five-year NPV: $415 M for a mid-size IOU; payback in 17 months. 6 Security & Compliance IEC 62443, TSA directive, NERC CIP v8 pre-mapped; evidence vault for auditors. 7 Pilot Story Arkansas River Electric cut outage MTTR 41 %, deferred $63 M capex via condition-based maintenance. 8 Workforce Upskilling "Grid Academy Lite" VR modules certify OT techs on cyber & AI within 8 weeks. 9 Sustainability Edge Carbon-aware load shifting lowered peaker-plant runtime 12 %. 10
Conclusion Modern infrastructure isn't optional–it's existential. VSI's benchmark + roadmap makes the journey quantifiable and fundable.
