Executive Summary

• The World Economic Forum has cited ‘everything-to-grid’ energy as one of its top 10 emerging technologies in its latest insight report
• The citation comes as the WEF, alongside Frontiers, sees multiple technologies evolving in step, from the battery to the hardware moving power between the battery and the grid
• One provider with a vision of everything-to-grid is Eaton, who also has a separate buildings-as-a-grid offering

Earlier this month, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published its latest Top 10 Emerging Technologies insight report. The report, in its 14th iteration and published alongside Frontiers, points to scientific advances ‘ready to change the world’, in the words of Frontiers chief executive editor Frederick Fenter. The very first technology cited makes for interesting reading – particularly given the work required to balance and strengthen the grid amid the push for clean power.

‘Everything-to-grid’ energy, the WEF notes, relates to various concepts with a single goal: to not just have energy available, but to mobilise it when the grid needs it most. “Every building, vehicle and device becomes a place that can store power, return it, and help balance supply and demand in real-time, turning the grid into a network of intelligent nodes,” the report explains.

This requires multiple technologies to evolve in step. The first is inside the battery, where a ‘generation of new chemistries is finally addressing the constraints that have held grid-scale storage back.’ In other words, it is the harnessing of lithium and sodium. In 2025, lithium-ion batteries surpassed traditional nickel batteries in global electric vehicle (EV) deployments for the first time.

The portents are solid going forward, as recent reporting on Electrical Insight has shown. A study published in April in the Cell Reports Physical Science journal concluded the EV battery market was well-equipped to cope with raw material shortages, affirming the move from nickel-manganese-cobalt to lithium ion phosphate, which can be manufactured more cost-effectively and with fewer critical materials. Another study, from Versinetic, argued there should be little concern about the abundance of materials.

Alongside this is development in the hardware that moves power between the batteries and the grid, the WEF report notes, with advancements in semiconductors key, new control systems letting distributed storage ‘actively stabilise the grid rather than passively feed it’, and coordination software turning millions of assets into a single orchestrated resource.

“Compensation frameworks are beginning to pay for storage based on the electricity it delivers rather than only for the energy it delivers,” the report notes. “What these advances produce together is a layer of distributed storage and intelligence woven throughout the system – coordinated rather than commanded.”

Rather than function only as consumers of electricity, these assets can adjust their consumption or even send electricity back to the grid, according to Zhaoyang Dong and Yuechuan Tao of the City University of Hong Kong. “Collectively, these represent a vast source of distributed flexibility that could help absorb surplus renewable energy, reduce peak demand, and support grid stability,” they noted.

One company adhering to this strategy is Eaton. As far back as 2021, the power management giant outlined how everything as a grid defined a simplified energy future. Mike Longman, formerly SVP at Eaton, said in a podcast: “We’re moving to a world where something as small as your home might generate electricity with solar panels, store it in a battery storage system, utilise software that decides when to use the electricity from solar, when to charge the batteries, when to release the charge from the batteries, and optimise that whole process and determine when to sell things back to the grid.”

Longman gave the example of a data centre, where multiple sources of electricity supply are coordinated from the diesel generators there, to on-site solar, to the utility feed, and then using the batteries connecting their UPS to provide various services back to the grid. “That type of balancing at any size is really what we mean when we say everything is a grid,” he added.

Eaton has a separate building as a grid offering, making it easier for integration of renewables, energy storage and EV charging infrastructure: “When your building is an electric grid, it’s easier to get the power you need and make your infrastructure work better and harder.”

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