Power constraints are becoming a real brake on robotic adoption.
That’s what Robert Liew, Director, Integrated Energy Research, at Wood Mackenzie, said in a Wood Mackenzie statement sent to Rigzone recently, adding that this “matters because labor markets in developed economies are running short of alternatives”.
“Industrial robots already draw 78 TerraWatt-hours (TWh) a year globally, and that is before humanoid robots reach any real scale. By 2035, combined demand could hit 363 TWh,” he added.
In the statement, which highlighted new Wood Mackenzie research on robotics and power demand, the company said the global robotics industry will consume as much electricity as France generates from nuclear power within a decade.
“The finding arrives as energy capacity planning is already under pressure from AI data centers, making robotics a second and largely unmodelled demand on global electricity infrastructure,” Wood Mackenzie warned.
The company estimated in the statement that combined robotics power consumption would come in at 363 TWh annually by 2035, with industrial robots accounting for 357 TWh and humanoid robots adding a further six TWh per year.
“The industrial robotic market’s growth by 2035 is drawing power and approaching data centre scale,” Wood Mackenzie highlighted in the statement.
“The five million robots in operation today consume 78 TWh a year, almost twice London’s electricity consumption. Wood Mackenzie expects the operational fleet to reach 16 million units by 2035, if it can maintain the current pace of expansion at 12 percent a year,” it added.
The company noted that no single country shapes this market more than China, adding that the country accounts for over 70 percent of annual global industrial robot installations. It added that Chinese companies are responsible for nearly 90 percent of all humanoid units currently in deployment.
“China State Grid illustrates that position directly,” Wood Mackenzie pointed out in the statement.
“It is spending $1 billion in 2026 to buy 8,500 AI-enabled autonomous robots for more than 600 specialized tasks, from routine grid maintenance to live-line work on ultra-high voltage power lines,” it added.
Wood Mackenzie said humanoid robots are still early in their rollout but warned that they were “growing fast”.
“If the global market reaches one billion units by 2050, power demand from humanoid robots alone could match South Korea’s entire electricity generation in 2026,” it said.
“Increasingly competitive prices are pulling more buyers in. Average humanoid robot prices fell 93 percent between 2020 and 2025 to $58,000,” it added.
“China’s Unitree Robotics’ G1 is now priced at $16,000, with an estimated annual electricity cost of $82 per unit at eight hours a day (based on a global average industrial tariff of US$0.14 per kWh), significantly below human labor costs in most markets despite it being mostly used in limited settings,” it continued.
In its statement Wood Mackenzie noted that robotics demand has grown for over a decade, “driven by structural labor shortages, rising labor costs, and supply chain security concerns”.
“AI advances in computer vision, large language models, and reinforcement learning have extended robot capability into logistics, healthcare, and field operations,” it added.
The company highlighted in its statement that most industrial robots draw power directly from the local grid, without low-carbon sourcing mandates. It also pointed out that robotics training infrastructure is captured within data center demand estimates and excluded in Wood Mackenzie’s analysis to avoid double counting.
Robotics in Oil and Gas
In a statement sent to Rigzone by the GlobalData team back in February, GlobalData announced that oil and gas robotics deployment was expanding as the global market headed toward $205 billion in 2030.
“Robotics is rapidly transforming oil and gas operations as advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing unlock the next phase of industrial automation,” GlobalData noted in that statement.
“AI enables advanced decision-making, navigation in complex environments, and reduced reliance on human intervention. Against this backdrop, the global robotics market is projected to grow from $90.2 billion in 2024 to $205.5 billion in 2030,” it added.
GlobalData’s statement pointed out that a recent strategic intelligence report from the company at the time highlighted how robotics was increasingly being adopted across the oil and gas value chain “to improve safety, efficiency, and asset integrity”.
The company noted that operators such as Equinor deploy subsea autonomous vehicles, including Hydrone-R, for extended underwater inspections, while Shell uses Cyberhawk drones and Sensabot robots for aerial and ground-based inspection of flare stacks, tanks, and pipelines. It also highlighted that BP and Chevron have trialed Spot quadruped robots to autonomously survey facilities and collect visual, thermal, and methane data, reducing personnel exposure to hazardous environments.
“Autonomous robotic systems are being introduced across hazardous, remote, and offshore environments to perform inspection, surveillance, and monitoring tasks without continuous human control,” Ravindra Puranik, Oil and Gas Analyst at GlobalData, said in the statement.
“While challenges remain, the integration of robotics with digital twins, edge intelligence, and predictive analytics is accelerating. As these technologies mature, robotics will move beyond supporting roles to become indispensable operational assets, across the oil and gas industry,” Puranik added.
In a statement sent to Rigzone earlier this year by the GlobalData team, the company outlined “robotics” as one of the “strategic themes transforming the oil and gas industry” in 2026.
In a BMI report sent to Rigzone by the Fitch Group recently, which looked at the evolution of oil and gas markets through to 2050, analysts at BMI said the accelerating adoption of AI and robotics will support more efficient capital investments, “yielding higher production at lower risks but at the expense of lower labor requirements”.