In a recent episode of the United States Energy Association’s Power Sector Podcast, recorded live at the Schneider Electric Innovation Summit, Rehlko President and CEO Brian Melka sat down with journalist Herman K. Trabish to discuss one of the most urgent challenges facing the energy landscape today: how to meet rapidly rising electricity demand with resilient, flexible, and forward-looking solutions.

Melka began by grounding the conversation in Rehlko’s century-long legacy, explaining, “We provide energy resilience. We provide power when the grid doesn’t.”

Rehlko’s core business is generator manufacturing, a field the company helped pioneer more than 100 years ago. Today, that portfolio has expanded into a wide spectrum of technologies, including battery energy storage, power management, hydrogen fuel cells, and hybrid solutions. While Rehlko doesn’t manufacture solar or wind systems, it engineers and installs the infrastructure that ties those resources into comprehensive, customer-ready solutions.

A central theme of the discussion was the extraordinary pressure data centers are placing on the grid. Melka highlighted that while a typical data center once required just 5 megawatts of capacity, many now exceed 100 megawatts—and proposals for 1gigawatt campuses are emerging. Coupled with a U.S. grid infrastructure where 60–70% of assets are nearing the end of life; the strain is unprecedented.

Rehlko’s answer? Co-locating new power generation directly alongside data centers. Building on-site generation, often behind the meter, dramatically accelerates speed to power while reducing transmission losses and easing the burden on retail utility customers. Melka underscored that the industry is not waiting years to adopt these models, saying, “[These solutions] are evolving in real time. This is not five years in the future. These models are developing and rapidly being deployed now.”

Melka also pointed to another often-overlooked opportunity: leveraging existing distributed assets. Millions of megawatts of backup generators already sit idle across hospitals, retailers, commercial sites, and homes. With regulatory modernization and emissions upgrades, those assets could help stabilize the grid during peak periods, similar to successful approaches used for decades in the UK.

Looking ahead, Melka envisions a fundamental shift in grid architecture. Instead of a centralized system designed more than a century ago, he predicts a future built on distributed, locally managed microgrids—interconnected, flexible, and increasingly shaped by the needs of data centers and other large energy consumers.

To hear Brian Melka’s full conversation on the USEA Power Sector Podcast, listen to the complete episode here, and read Brian’s full LinkedIn recap here.