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The electricity system in the U.S. is being asked to do something it has not done in decades: grow quickly. For years, power demand stayed close to flat. Artificial intelligence has changed that arithmetic. Goldman Sachs Research puts U.S. data center power demand at about 41 gigawatts this year, up from 31 gigawatts in 2025, and expects it to reach 66 gigawatts in 2027. Worldwide, Gartner sees data center power demand rising roughly 27% this year to about 132 gigawatts. The consulting firm Grid Strategies now finds that the five-year forecast of U.S. utility peak load growth has risen to 166 gigawatts, more than six times the level of three years earlier.
That demand does not arrive on its own. Before a data center can draw a single watt, engineers have to design the substations, transmission lines, and connections that carry power from the grid to the building. This is technical, unglamorous work, and it has quietly become a bottleneck. Grid operators and the Electric Power Research Institute describe a shift in which the constraint has moved from the server rack to the substation. Electrification, meaning the move toward electric vehicles, heat pumps, and industrial processes that once ran on fuel, plus a wave of battery storage projects, feeds the same pipeline of engineering work.
One company doing exactly this kind of work is Willdan Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: WLDN), a technical services firm focused on energy and infrastructure. It helps utilities, government agencies, and commercial customers across the U.S. and Canada with energy planning, consulting, software, public finance, engineering, and program implementation. The company announced that it had acquired substantially all of the assets of KCS Corporation, an engineering consulting firm based in suburban Chicago, Illinois.
KCS is not a household name, and it is not large. Its team of 15 people specializes in power delivery engineering for critical infrastructure, the design work behind the substations and transmission lines that utilities depend on. Founded in 1999, KCS has helped investor-owned utilities build new substations and expand existing ones, and it has supported wind farms, utility-scale solar, battery storage, and backup power for data centers. It is a certified Minority Business Enterprise and has taken on projects in the U.S., Canada, and Japan.
The 15 engineers and project managers join Willdan’s APG team, the electrical engineering business (originally named Alternative Power Generation) that Willdan acquired in early 2025 to build out this very capability. The two firms had already worked together on substation and renewables projects, so they knew each other well. Chief Executive Mike Bieber said demand for the company’s energy infrastructure services keeps growing, and that the KCS engineers had acted as a natural extension of his own team. Seemesh M. Sethi, KCS’s president, framed the deal as a next chapter, one that lets his clients reach a broader set of engineering services while keeping the personal approach the firm was built on.
Financial terms were not disclosed, which tells you something on its own. A 15-person asset purchase is not the sort of transaction that reshapes a company generating more than $500 million in annual revenue. What it does is add trained people in a specialty where hiring is hard and the backlog of work keeps growing. When the shortage is skilled engineers rather than customers, buying a capable team is a practical way to expand.
The larger point is about where value collects in the electricity build-out. Most attention goes to the chipmakers and the cloud giants spending billions on data centers, yet every one of those facilities needs a connection to the grid, and that connection has to be engineered. The companies that supply the picks and shovels of power delivery, the substations and the people who design them, benefit quietly from the same surge. This deal is a small, concrete example of a firm adding that kind of muscle while the demand is still building.
