At the Crossroads of Utilities and Tech

Have you ever thought about how we got here, to this particular moment in the energy transition? As I look back on how my career has taken shape, random events now seem guided by an undercurrent of progress and purpose. Some of you may know that I started out on this journey with a background in anthropology and linguistics. As such, I can’t help thinking about the “energy transition” not just as a shift in infrastructure or business models, but as an ongoing cultural transformation too.

Here’s how I got to this moment, through a growing family, tech advances, and changes in the energy industry. (TLDR? Check out the graphic below for my personal timeline.)

Formation: The Cloud Takes Shape

Twenty years ago, right around the time my kids came along, advanced metering was just on the horizon. We thought about computing being tied to a place, with servers, hard drives, and disks. But the tech world was all about to change. When my second child was born in 1999, Salesforce changed the market with its “No Software” and “As-a-Service” approach. I still remember how leery people in our industry were of hosting data and business services in “the cloud.” Why entrust critical assets to a nebulous concept? A few years later, the Energy Policy Act pushed utilities to develop plans for how they would use AMI data, and it soon became clear how unwieldy it would be to transfer and reconcile such huge amounts of data all the time, between so many physical machines.

Democratization: Putting Data in Everyone's Hands

Twenty-five years ago there was a company called WebVan that delivered groceries to our homes. We ordered online and they kept our lists and customer data. Everyone thought that was So Crazy. And it was my lifesaver as a new mom. They went out of business and people laughed at their business model. Now you're all thinking, what's so weird about that? It's normal now.?

I re-entered the workforce after 10 years of raising kids full time. I worked for eMeter, the first meter data management company to focus on utility AMI data. Some companies and cell service providers had figured out how to use data for efficiency and convenience, but utilities weren’t quite there. I remember shaking my head during a long Texas PUC workshop as they discussed how quickly ERCOT would be able to provide meter data to retail energy suppliers to give them insights on their customer's usage. While I sat through the proceedings, I could work with my cell phone company to resolve a weird charge on my bill because they had up-to-the-minute usage data. It felt a little like Richard Feynman putting the o-ring in a glass of ice water at the Challenger investigation hearings.

The energy industry started to embed data in social context, too. The first Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change Conference (BECC) in 2007 was an amazing confluence of social scientists, behavioral psychologists, energy companies, and climate change experts who realized that we needed each other. And we needed data, to make some serious global cultural shifts to transition off fossil fuels. I was activated at that conference---my anthropologist side and my techie side were finally integrated. At that first BECC, a lot of people had the idea of data-driven behavior change to save energy, but it clicked for me when I saw a little poster session with Dan Yates and Alex Laskey; that poster was the humble preview to Opower’s eventual dominance in helping utilities to be able to treat a behavioral switch as seriously as a mechanical switch.

Monetization: Demand Response and Peak Load Management Come Into Play

By the time my eldest was in middle school, eMeter was acquired by Siemens. In subsequent years I moved on to work on product marketing at a home energy management device OEM, joined the start-up staff of the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, and contracted my services to energy efficiency and demand side management program implementers.

During that period, utilities were using hourly consumption data to better forecast load and introduce more dynamic pricing. Demand response became viable once we had granular insight into when and where energy was consumed. Aggregators had enough data to pool the resources of C&I customers and bid into the energy market with the promise of NOT drawing from the grid at peak demand times, and everyone made or saved money from shifting load.

There was a slew of Smart Grid conferences with variations on the theme of helping utilities be like tech companies. Peak load management and home energy analytics were where utilities could start mining data for value, and they talked about “being the Amazon of utilities.” At various consulting firms, I marketed the services of econometric wizards who designed algorithms to help utilities balance load accurately, in real time, and with locational insight.

Behavior Modification: We Change Our Relationship with Data and Devices

By the time my kids were teens, we were all counting likes and views on our devices. We gave companies all our cookies so that we could share more and more data to feed our feeds. We got frustrated when our utilities couldn’t tell us when the power would be back on or even know who we were when we called. Utilities were still talking at conferences about trying to be like tech companies, but now Uber was added to Amazon and Google as an example of what utilities wanted to be able to offer---personalized communications, faster responses, seamless digital transactions, and data-driven insights.

The obsession with a data-driven life coincided with my children’s growing desire to hold my generation accountable for turning climate change around. (So they could have a future.) Their generation is one of the first ones for whom “data science” is a viable career choice. Now it’s a common part of life to track progress, measure outcomes, and make sense of data. Today, most of us can’t imagine solving big problems like climate change without this kind of approach, and the digital tools we need to help analyze, track, and share that data.

Digital Transformation: The Energy Cloud Becomes a Thing

In the 2010s, Navigant (before they were acquired by Guidehouse) introduced the idea of an “energy cloud” - a digital layer making it possible to decentralize the power system and enable the flow of energy between multiple actors on the grid, between suppliers and consumers. During the same period, PNNL, GridSMART, and NIST were demonstrating the benefits of “transactive energy” using control technologies and smart meters to better match supply with the time and location of demand, automate usage to make consumers more efficient, and supply more local renewable energy to consumers.

All of this required two-way power flows and the sensors and real-time data capture to be able to manage transactions. And, it required behavioral insight, specifically a 360-degree view of the human actors driving those decisions. Where were they using energy, when were they using energy, why were they using the energy, who influences their energy use, and what would motivate them to adjust their usage patterns to benefit everyone else around them? (That 360-degree view has a name at Salesforce. We call it the "Customer 360" and Brian Tong has a fast, fun explanation of it.)

With my kids now out of the nest, I joined Salesforce via the acquisition of Vlocity. When Kelly James was recruiting me, she explained the premise of building an actual Energy & Utilities Cloud to connect utilities with their customers and increase customer satisfaction. I had never associated Salesforce with the energy industry before, but it made sense. As the utility industry fully embraced cloud and digital strategies, it wasn’t enough to tinker with traditional ERPs to inch their way to the cloud. Utilities needed cloud native solutions and comprehensive digital transformation strategies. This was exactly the kind of insight that Salesforce had been optimizing for companies in other industries. Salesforce offered a defining industry cloud solution, and I saw the convergence of my varied career experiences.

Future Innovation: From People Like You

I’ve kept in touch with many people with similar evolving career trajectories in this space. Now is a great time to be about this work. In the U.S., recent legislation has given us even more impetus to rebuild our power grid to be both cleaner and more just. My mentors (smart grid and demand response veterans who built the foundation of this transition) have been joined by a new generation of young professionals whose career centers actually had “climate tech” as a category and who don’t think utility work is obscure. My current colleagues, a core team of Energy & Utilities experts, give me daily stories of utilities using data and cloud strategies to transform our relationship with energy on a grand scale.

We’ll need to bring all the human ingenuity and will we can muster to get to this cleaner, more resilient energy future. My experience is just a strand of the whole picture, and each of you has a place in this tapestry too. In future installments I look forward to spotlighting more of the the ongoing efforts in this big work we’re all doing together. If you want to help me shine a light on good work, or have a story to contribute, I welcome you to reach out.

The views expressed in my newsletter and posts represent my own opinions and not necessarily those of my employer, Salesforce.

Side Trails

Each issue I’ll post a few links to content or people to follow, so we can weave a stronger, denser, bigger network together.

My picks for this week:

• ?? ILLUME Advising Magazine - The team at ILLUME offers well-researched insights about utility customer strategy, behavior change, energy equity, social science, and climate change. This gorgeous publication is a unique convergence of art, engineering, economics, and social science.
• ??? ICF Podcast - ICF has always been where the action is with energy transition projects and their podcast spotlights some great collaborators. In Episode #8, two transportation electrification experts, Emily Phan-Gruber and Stacy Noblet, discuss EV adoption and innovative utility programs.
• ?? eIQ Mobility Newsletter - Curated by Yann Kulp, this newsletter collects developments in EV and EV Charging Infrastructure. It’s a great round-up of all the work being done (and that work is revving up), so I use it as my shortcut to staying on top of the transportation electrification revolution.
• ???Volts Podcast - Journalist and writer David Roberts is a fantastic interviewer and can always get his guests to talk about where the rubber meets the road: all the nerdy nitty-gritty specifics of what they’re trying to achieve, who they’re working with, and why they do what they do. He can go from the deep weeds of an astonishingly sensible solution for networked geothermal to the sweeping vistas of climate policy. I can’t keep up with the content, honestly, but every time I listen I come away bursting with excitement about what we will be able to achieve together to eradicate fossil-fuel consumption.