Alliant Insurance Services has promoted Martin Newman (pictured) to managing director, Energy Operations, within Alliant Property & Casualty. Based in Dallas, Newman will retain his existing production responsibilities while taking on a broader operational mandate for the firm's energy practice, working alongside Alliant Energy leadership on growth, client service and capability-building across the sector.
Newman has spent his career at the intersection of energy and insurance, joining Alliant after prior roles at Marsh and earlier as a producer at Ragland Strother & Lafitte.
Karey Vaught, managing director at Alliant Energy, said Newman's new responsibilities extend beyond client-facing production into the operational infrastructure behind the practice. "Martin will broaden his impact across the business through increased operational responsibilities, playing a key role in integrating strategic acquisitions, recruiting and retaining top talent, and bringing together the full breadth of Alliant's expertise, relationships and resources in the energy insurance market," Vaught said.
The appointment arrives at a moment when the power sector's risk profile is changing faster than most traditional underwriting models are built to track.
Growing electricity demand from data centers and other energy-intensive infrastructure has become one of the more pressing underwriting questions in the sector. S&P projects data centers could account for approximately 14% of US power demand by 2030, up from 5% in 2025 - a shift significant enough to alter how the grid operates under peak load conditions, and therefore how insurers should think about business interruption, power availability and generation risk for any client whose operations depend on grid reliability.
That is no longer a theoretical concern. A severe heat wave over the July 4th weekend pushed PJM Interconnection, the largest power grid in the US, to a projected peak load exceeding 162,000 megawatts. The US Department of Energy declared a statutory emergency and authorized the grid operator to curtail data center load directly. Wholesale power prices on PJM averaged $136.53 per megawatt-hour in the first quarter of 2026 - up 76% year over year - with an independent market monitor attributing nearly two-thirds of that increase to data center load specifically.
The insurance implications run across several exposure categories simultaneously. Power generation clients face business interruption risk tied to grid reliability, not just physical damage to their own assets. Industrial and commercial clients whose operations depend on continuous power face BI exposure from grid events outside their control. Data center operators face a concentrated convergence of property, liability and contingent business interruption risk that did not exist at current scale five years ago. And the entire exposure picture is evolving in near real time as the grid's composition, load profile and stress points shift with accelerating speed.
Analysts have argued that insurers underwriting power generation risk on static historical surveys are increasingly exposed to a grid risk profile that is shifting faster than traditional underwriting models account for. If that is right, the broker who can accurately characterize a client's exposure - including its dependence on grid reliability, the composition of its generation assets, and its vulnerability to the specific stress events the PJM emergency illustrated - is providing something materially different from one routing the same submission through a standard energy application.
Newman's expanded mandate specifically names integration of strategic acquisitions, talent recruitment and market relationship-building as its three operational components. For energy risk clients and the PE investors who back many of them, that combination matters because the complexity of the risk does not sit within any single underwriting line. Business interruption, power availability credit exposure, construction risk for new generation assets, and environmental liability from legacy infrastructure can each fall under different towers, different carriers, and different specialist underwriters. A practice built to connect those strands - rather than handle each in isolation - is better positioned to give clients a coherent program rather than a collection of separately placed policies that may not respond coherently under the same loss event.
