Grid Modernization is Bringing Utilities and Internet Providers to the Table. How Will Collaboration Shape the Grid?

Hello, everyone. Happy Wednesday, and welcome to another episode of Experts Talk, MarketScales premium debate and discussion roundtable where we sit down with the top voices in your industry to talk shop on major trends, technologies, timely topics, news, trade shows, you name it, to really get a pulse check on the market movers and the most important discussions that we need to be having in our industries. And again, we're platforming and hearing from the experts, the thought leaders, the researchers, the folks that are making it happen every day in their industry. We're letting their voices speak for themselves and really talk shop and, again, have some constructive debate and discussion, to figure out strategy and an actionable path forward on some of these major topics. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of b two b. Thanks so much for joining us. If this is your first time, welcome. You're gonna love what we're about to get into. And if you're a returning guest here on Experts Talk, well, you know the deal, and I hope you're ready for the ride. If you, don't know where to find previous episodes of show, well, I'm I'm about to tell you. You can go to market scale dot com, to find previous episodes of Experts Talk, and you can find upcoming listings of our round tables for, next week and also for the month of April, which will be loaded up on the site here. Soon, we're going live multiple times a week with different industries and different experts. So plenty of thought leadership to consume and participate in if you're an expert yourself. I'll tell you how you can get involved at the end of the show. Alright, folks. Let's jump in. As you can see with the ticker below, we're gonna be talking the larger energy industry here. We're gonna be talking utilities and, ISP collaboration. And, really, what we're talking about here is some of the major needs that are realizing themselves, through the grid modernization process. So the US energy grid is undergoing a critical era of change as it modernizes its capabilities. Right? It it's, embracing new digital solutions. It's rethinking the makeup of its energy portfolio. There are new stakeholders being created, with the rise of the energy prosumer here. Right? And overall, the grid is, preparing itself for the distributed and decentralized future of energy generation, distribution, and transmission. But within this shift, there's this emphasis on collaboration across various stakeholders. This was very clear at DistributeTech twenty twenty four, which I attended in a lot of the interviews I did there. The theme of collaboration rang out as, a priority for basically every player in the industry. And within that, there's an important nexus point of collaboration, and that is coordination between utilities and ISPs. And more broadly, coordination between, sort of energy industry players, grid players, and the folks providing the network services, that are enabling the modern grid. Right? The larger telecom and utilities industries are increasingly intertwined, in supporting the highly connected, highly highly energy reliant industries of today. So today's big question then is how can they better support each other in this mission of modernizing the grid, whether that's in infrastructure, services, research, investments, industry evangelism, you name it. There's so many opportunities to align and, execute on realizing the modern grade of today and tomorrow. So where do we start? Well, let's let the experts talk on experts talk and get their perspectives here today. I'm very pleased to welcome our panel of three thought leaders and pros in the industry who are gonna help make sense of this collaboration, Nexus. Welcome to the three of you. It's a real treat, to source all three of you today. Let's go down the line, do some intros. First up, we're joined by doctor Dominique Meyer. He's founder and CEO of Look AI. Doctor Meyer, great to have you on. How you doing? Great. Thank you so much for having me today. Very excited to dive into this discussion. Absolutely, man. Real pleasure to have you here. We're also joined by Nick Tomilovich. He is the director of distributed energy management products at Itron. Nick, great to have you on. How are you doing? Good, Daniel. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Pleasure having your perspectives here as well. And last but not least, we're joined by mister Charlie Nobles. He's vice president of utilities business development at Ubiquia. Charlie, great to have you on as well. How are you? Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. So on this panel, audience, we have players from the forefront of the utilities industry's digital transformation. Right? All of these professionals and the companies that they work for and with are supporting this layer of connected services, solutions, and insights for the modern grid. So y'all are really at that nexus point, right, of the utility industry's transformation, and obviously the needed network services that are going to facilitate this next generation for the grid. And this connected nature of the modern grid in terms of connected devices and smart networks is obviously pretty evident. It's rather undeniable at this point, to all of those in the industry. But just how interconnected and reliant the modern grid will be on reliable, capable networks both at the edge and also just as a foundational utility itself, might be a bit taken for granted. So what I wanted to do was get a pulse check here with you all to start. Right? Give us that pulse check on where the energy grid is at right now in terms of its digital transformation and modernization journey. Right? How far along are we in deploying, and making consistent use of some of these smart connected devices, decentralized and distributed energy infrastructure, you know, network services, etcetera. Are we at a moment of critical inflection? Right? Or are we still laying a lot of the groundwork? Let's hear it from y'all. Sure. I can I can jump in? I think first of all, I appreciate you having all of us on here because you talked about, you know, topics like, you know, the the prosumer, and we talk about the grid, and we have grid operations. And one thing that, we're doing here at, which is a forty year old metering company that is trying to support utilities to advance a path towards decarbonization. And, these are very, very fast approaching goals. So we have some utilities across the country, across the globe that are looking at, you know, twenty, thirty, not net zero, rather one hundred percent clean energy goals. So how do these customers bring in and absorb the intermittent generation through solar and wind? How do we let our customers adopt electric vehicles and solar and energy storage? And, and making that connection between the grid operations and, customer and customer programs is going to be really important. And so there's all sorts of types of data communication that needs to take place. And it could be, you know, LTE cellular. It could be, wireless mesh networks that connect all these meters, across the country. And so that's that's really I think the key is to make sure that all these different entities that excel in their respective areas are partnering, and they're collaborating together. So, so thought I'd use that comment to kick it off, and I'm I'm glad we're kinda joined here at the hip with, with these three entities. So So I'll take a stab at that. Go ahead, Dominique. I you have the floor. Did it. So, you you know, Nick, I think you nailed it with the interconnectivity, between distributed energy systems and renewables coming into play, battery storage systems, EVs, pulling a demand that I think the grid has never seen before. And, you know, that's, I think, kicking off a inflection point to how we gotta think about the modernization of our grid. And that comes at first point to understanding what is currently there. Right? And look, AI is a company where we're really heavily focused on that asset intelligence or those physical assets, those information pieces of the critical human infrastructure that we need to modernize our grid, and then come up with a plan. Right? And these utilities, and telcos need to really proactively think about that data efficiency so that they come up come up with a plan. Right? How to address the energy challenges that we have never faced before. Right? And that's really where all of our focuses can and will be in the coming decades to to succeed. So I'll give you guys a perspective. I've been watching the grid evolve for many years. I used to be a, utility, manager, so I've been in the in operational size side of the grid. And the grid you mentioned the term, Daniel, that the modern grid. The grid used to be very monolithic. It was from trans just, generation, transmission, distribution to the loads. And the loads are very simple loads. They were consuming only. And now, there was a push in the eighties, early nineties for improvements in safety and safety. So what did we do? We sectionalized the grid so we could minimize impact as we had outages or issues. And by sectionalizing the grid, we added a lot of moving parts, which themselves are potential failure points. And now we have behind the meter loads, distributed energy resources. We have rooftop solar, which has bidirectional flow, of course. We have EV, which is the great unplanned load. So complex things behind the meter. Much more segmentation, and sectionalization within the grid distribution side proper, a lot of moving parts. So the modern grid is a much more complex organization. And I think my perspective is, and I'd like to talk about this just a second, is how we define grid edge. In the past, it's been at the load, the delivered load, and smart meters. And I used to run the metering organization for Progress Energy, so I come from a metering AMI world. And that was the edge. And we used the term grid edge, and I'm not so sure that's a proper term anymore when you add the complexity and sophistication of the behind the meter loads, and now look upstream from the meter to other things, like, that are possible, like what we're doing at Ubiquia, monitoring distribution transformers in real time, what's the edge? Is the edge, does it start at the transformer and move down? Is the edge still at the demarcation point of where the load is provided to the customer? Is the edge inclusive of the behind the meter loads, which oftentimes are actually provided, by the utility. So it's a more complicated grid. There's a lot of moving parts. I think we are underrepresented in terms of monitoring the grid proper. We have a lot of edge devices, but now edge, I think, is broadening from a very sharp edge to a much more blunt edge that's more encompassing. So that's a very complicated landscape that we have to solve. I'll jump in here, Charlie. So this is really important, I think, is to define the grid edge, and we ask a lot of different utilities. And from where I'm sitting, prior to my role at Itron, I was at Electric Power Research Institute where we're really independent nonprofit trying to understand how to characterize these things. Oftentimes, what we hear is that grid edge is, you know, please shine a light on the darkness of of where where I cannot see. And as a distribution system operator or utility, as we call it in the states, It's from the substation down to the thermostat hanging on the wall in your living room. And so so being able to, expose and have some data communications telemetry pathways to define, the grid conditions from the substation all the way down to the customer premise, I think is really important. And, the other thing I think that's really important is that leveraging what's already out there. We have, you know, hundreds of millions of things hanging on the walls on the side of customer facilities, premises, businesses, what have you, called the meter, right, the electric meter. And these days, you know, the meter is no longer a meter anymore. It's actually a, it's a gateway. It's a controller. It's an embedded Linux server. And so now you not only have the ability to, you know, every billing cycle, thirty days or month, what have you, understand, how the customers are pulling that dynamic flow of energy, pushing and pulling onto the grid. But you have the ability to also understand what's happening at that transformer level, like you mentioned, Charlie, and that's really what utilities are looking for. And, and I think the discussion here today is how do we how do we leverage that? How do we get that that data back to the utilities in a cost effective and scalable manner? So I I I wanna touch on logos on the, parts of the assets that you cannot see or cannot measure. Right? And I think the meters are a place that you can have very clear observables to grid behavior, between that substation into, you know, homes, into businesses. But there are a lot of uncertain factors that utilities care about. That's where the interplay between telecom and electric utilities resource mattering. Is it a failed wire conductor because a tree come back came down and that also affected the fiber? Is it an undergrounding, scenario where you have aging of of cables? All those factors really foster, I think, a thought process beyond what you can easily measure into how can you combine different data sources. Right? And I think when you start combining what, for example, a meter can show into what physical assets, degrade or the physical conditions are, all of a sudden, you have so much more information to work off of to be able to understand how how do you deal with this large scale problem and how do you efficiently resolve this for millions of customers that you need to service reliably. Yeah. If I could jump in there, Dominique, that's a great point as well. We talk about the visibility gap, and I think, Daniel, you mentioned from substation to meter. We I call that from feeder to meter. And to be honest with you, there's not a lot of visibility there, to Dominic's point. We have disparate solutions and disparate devices at capacitor banks, regulators, etcetera. And we have every meter is smart in some way. But between the chain link fence of the substation and the meter, there's really not a lot. And that is the largest expanse of the distribution grid. And I think to that point, we have to monitor more things. We tend to think in utility business of of SCADA and what things we can control. Can we automatically control that cap bank? But I think we have to my my, opinion is for every one device we control in the grid, we need to monitor ten other points. I think it's a ten to one. I'm making this Noble's Law ten to one. Ten monitoring points for every control point. And frankly, I think the next frontier is the distribution the lowly distribution transformer. And because when you monitor at the meter and at the transformer, and you can look upstream into the primary network, downstream into the load along with the meter, and start to combine these disparate devices into one holistic view of the grid, now I think you have tremendous value. And I think that's I know we're kind of all topic from how do the telcos play here, and I'm gonna bring that back in. One of the things we do at Ubiquia is we use the existing, scaled, robust, secure LTE networks. Now there's a big push for private LTE networks as well. But in addition to the bespoke networks already out there, the metering networks, etcetera, I think there's a play for if monitoring the rest of these devices, these assets in the field, as Dominique mentioned, that are in the dark, as Nick mentioned. But using LTE networks for those. Do not try to do everything on either your AMI network or some other network you've already deployed, but not to keep deploying disparate point solutions. Use the LTE networks. It's robust. It's real time. Bring data back from these other devices that you can shine a light on and combine that holistically with the the data you already have and get a fuller picture of what's out there. That I think that's the crossover I'd like to present between the the carriers and the utilities is letting the carriers participate by providing access to low cost, ubiquitous LTE networks for now monitoring new classes of devices in the grid. Yeah. I'd like to Let's go ahead and jump in here just to, play on that too. I I y'all are, I think, getting now to the point where, you know, let's talk a little bit more about where this collaboration is already at and where it needs to improve. Right? So, obviously, carriers and utilities are already collaborating. It's not like the modern grid is the first time. Now these two parties are deciding, okay, let's link up and coordinate a little bit. But we are seeing as the edge gets a little blunter as, Charlie was saying and as the, amount of connected devices and network needs expand, that collaboration is being redefined. And so I wanna just give some context on things that are happening in this sort of carrier side of the world, that I'd love to get y'all's thoughts on. On one side, we see massive federal funding distributed to the state level for broadband expansion and rural broadband revitalization with bead funding. Right? Major opportunity there as, we hunker down with billions of dollars to hopefully develop capable fiber infrastructure to support our network needs at the commercial and consumer level might be a good opportunity for collaboration. We're also seeing, other players in the space that are highlighting this collaboration like Broadband Alliance, which, Itron's actually a member of. They're pushing big time for private LTE networks. Again, private LTE networks to be the priority here for realizing the modern grid and being that nexus point of collaboration between these two parties to, you know, build out these networks, sustain them, and realize the benefits of them for that connected modern grid. So okay. A lot of moving pieces there. How are y'all seeing today ISPs or the carriers and and utilities collaborating already to support some some of these emerging modern grid needs, whether in infrastructure, in services, and more communication between parties for, like, insights, and and, infrastructure management? And where do we need to see that collaboration improve? Right? Where is it already at? How is it working well? Where does it need to improve? Give us your your thoughts, based on some of the context I provided too. This is only a thirty minute show. Right? Yeah. I know. I saw a question on a thirty minute show. Sorry. So that I'll I'll that's kinda my MO. Yeah. I'll provide some very brief context from a Nitron perspective is that, you know, I think the really important thing to understand the the diaspora of the utilities with the concept of flexibility. It still seems, I think, based on our perspective, that it's relatively early days to have, you know, to go one way or the other. We had, you know, old mesh networks out there. We have brand new, Gen X type of mesh networks with much larger broadband throughput in order to do so much more than the traditional meter to cash. And, many utilities are now kind of subscribing to, going to that more advanced telecommunications pipe. And that can include, you know, distributed intelligence through mesh networks. It can include private and public LTE as an uplink. So being flexible, I think, is gonna be really important because there's, you know, three thousand plus utilities out there just in the US alone, and everybody's at a different point, on their journey. So I think that's really key to enabling everybody to get on the bus and to, you know, meet their their end goals towards decarbonization. Alright. Jump in Go ahead, Dominic. Hi. I'll jump in quickly. So, you know, there's an important thought on how do we proactively plan for what we need to know. And I wanna think a little bit about, you know, those interconnected sensors and that backhaul of that information, in asset pieces that are not easily accessible. Right? So overground utilities, you can get to them. We have poles. Underground utilities, those are large capital expenses ranging from three to six million dollars per mile. Right? And there, you wanna equip sensors that you maybe need to maintain, maybe need to upgrade. But when you design these assets, right, with a lifetime expectancy of fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years, you really have to think about that sustainability and what's effective on your SAID numbers, what's that effective on your connectivity. And that's where we at Loc are starting to see some of the biggest interplay between the utilities on the electric side and the communication side to be able to share that information, right, and really get around the table and discuss, hey. What are we gonna put there so that we can together see what is happening so that we can work around issues? Because when you have an underground fault, that is a major fault. When you have an overhead utility fault, well, you get to it, but it's still a a piece of information that you really gotta think about, as you practically design and work on on these physical assets. Well, I'll I'll take a stab at a couple of comments around one of the things that you mentioned, Daniel, around broadband. And where does broadband fit? You know, we we look at the carrier networks or even private LTE networks or other types of networks in terms of their their their latency, their data packet size capabilities, and then we compare that versus the need of the thing you're sampling. I would I'll make two comments. One is I believe that, there's a move towards more of a point to point network point to multipoint network approach. The reason I say that is because for meters that you're providing, you know, as a meter to cash, outcome, you know, fifteen minute interval data is appropriate. What we're hearing is that is if you're monitoring, say, a capacitor bank or you're monitoring a distribution transformer that's serving a critical load, a hospital, a data center. You need data that's more real time. And sometimes, not in all cases, some of the network solutions that they have available, preclude that. I think that's why we're seeing a hard push or a look at private LTE or LTE. Now even within LTE, which is a standards based network, you've got different swim lanes. You've different categories from from broadband. You mentioned fiber all the way down to CAT one, CAT m, n v IOT. And now you can tailor the the pipe, the size of the pipe, to the type of latency requirements needed. For instance, if you're monitoring pole assets, we have a solution that monitors poles for tilt vibration impact. That could be NBIOT pipe. You're getting four or five measurements per day. You're you're sending out messages by, exemption or exception. But if you're monitoring a distribution transformer, every leg of a three phase pad serving a hospital, maybe a CAT m or CAT one is appropriate, but probably no need for fiber. If you're controlling devices, not just monitoring, but controlling devices, there may be cases where the the bandwidth of a fiber connection may be appropriate. So I think even within the carriers, there's a struggle of what's the right pipe for the application. At the minimum, I like LTE for its, robustness and ubiquitous nature and that it provides these different, pipes to use a nontechnical term. And you can kinda assign the pipe to the right application. I think that's where I'm trying to get to. So, Daniel, I wanna come back to the question that you had asked about where are we in the industry today. And in response, to, think, Charlie's comments, it's really important that we look at this from, like, a a customer utility by utility, perspective and look at it even one level deeper use case perspective. And it's important to share that with all of you in the audience today that we aren't using sub one gigahertz mesh networks today for AMI, next generation AMI. Some people call it distributed intelligence as we do. Some people call it grid edge compute. And we do have the ability to, at a second and a sub second, interval, be able to capture events, understand what the impact is of each and every facility that we're talking to and reporting from today on this call, and how it impacts that secondary transformer that's that we share with our neighbors. So it's very, very important that we have even down to waveform capture event based. And that's that's true. That pipe is not big enough to capture, you know, thirty four kilohertz type type, you know, samples, but it's there onboard to be able to, by exception, send it to the grid operator to say, wow. We should really be careful. Something's happening here. We need to protect that transformer before another EV plugs in. And so that's something that's actually happening today for, for dozens of utilities across the country with the existing infrastructure in place. It's all about bandwidth optimization. Right. Sure. I agree. And, to be honest with you, Daniel, I think we need to have around two. We didn't even really get started. I think there's the whole, Nick mentioned the whole EV unplanned load, challenge to the utilities. There's environmental concerns, storms, weather, growth. There's so many other aspects we could, have veered into and spent more than thirty minutes each hour. I agree. And, yeah, that brings us, you know, to I mean, you're I'm taking notes here because there's so many follow-up conversations that I feel like like we really need to be having, because there are so many sort of sub motivators that are putting pressure on the grid and that are also opening up opportunities for collaboration between these two, you know, major players that are going to facilitate the modern grid. Dominic, since you work in the, you know, infrastructure side of, the space, what are your thoughts on how these two spaces, again, the the carriers and utilities can be collaborating a little bit more on their infrastructure, like, just itself. Right? To help, support the modern grid. Whether that's building out new infrastructure or, better coordination, like asset coordination around existing infrastructure to support the modern grid? What are your thoughts there? Yeah. So I'll give a quick example. Right? So in the US, we think we have about two hundred million distribution poles. Right? That's many of which carry, you know, conductors that power our homes, and also fiber, overhead fiber. And that is one example, right, where that simple piece of information of what is the health of the pole that is responsibly managed by the pole owner of the electric utility. That also affects the the carrier. Right? Because if that poll goes down, your your fiber is likely gonna go down as well. So what we're starting to see is this very careful interchange of data, GIS data, whole health data, structural, information, everything onto just, you know, transformers, and vegetation management. And that's where I think there's a massive opportunity for these carriers and these to start working together. And again, here we are just at the forefront of starting to realize what it will take to get us to a state where we can cooperate with capital efficiency on these physical assets that will be lasting the next decades. You know, one of the stats I enjoy sharing, right, is that, you know, over seventy percent of our physical assets in this in this industry are over twenty five years old. Right? And the failure rate move age goes up, and that's where we have to be increasingly proactive about coming up with risk mitigation, disaster resilience across these physical assets, to be able to guarantee that we can modernize this grid in a safer capital efficient manner. And, I know we need to wrap up here in a few minutes. So my last question then is let's just bring it back around to private LTE networks because I feel like this is, really one of the priorities that the industry is putting some energy behind. I'm curious what role y'all see private LTE networks playing in, obviously the modern grid. But more importantly, do you see this adoption of private LTE networks being an opportunity for more robust collaboration between the carriers and utilities. Right? Perhaps to maybe develop these networks in a way that meets the very specific needs of the modern grid, you know, the way the connected devices need to be speaking to each other, etcetera, etcetera. And, and also for the reliability of these network services. What are y'all's thoughts there? I'll make a quick comment. Since we are exclusively LTE based in our solutions, we have a lot of discussions about private LTE. And the question is, well, we're gonna build out a private LTE network. It's gonna take us eight years. In the meantime, we want to use the carrier networks for the devices we put in the field and then move them over. So now you have this added complexity of how do you start off with a device that you do not want to touch again. It's in the field. It's deployed. It's communicating via a carrier based network. And now, over the air, point that to a private network five, six years from now. So your modem strategies have to be inclusive of supporting multiple three g p p bands in a way through eSIM technology that you can point them over the air to another band or another carrier, public or private, in the future. That's a huge challenge. You can't swap a SIM card out in the field once you've deployed the device. That's gonna take a lot of collaboration with the, the standards bodies for LTE, technology around eSIM and how you operationalize that, and then work within the the the project parameters of these utilities that want to do this migration. It's not trivial. Nick, any final thoughts on this one since I know, you need to bounce here in a minute or two? Yeah. Not much more to add other than, you know, this concept of flexibility. So we do see utilities exploring, public and private LTE. As Charlie said, that that will take some time, so I think it's a matter of building the right bridge to get us there to optimize. So that way, you know, it's good for the customer. It's good for the utility, and, eventually, that'll be good for the end customer. So that way, costs, I think, are optimized along the way. When you build that bridge, you wanna make it effective to get to where you wanna be in the end. And I I think that's gonna be the real key to getting all these partners to collaborate together. So, so I I think that that's how we're gonna be able to advance towards our goals. And, folks, I feel like more than any other roundtable I've done so far in experts talks, you know, few months of, you know, time on the air. This is the one where we have laid the groundwork for so many follow-up conversations because, again, we're talking about the movement of so many, different trends that are coalescing around this nexus point of needed collaboration between carriers and utilities. So I think we've set ourselves up well with an intro conversation, but we've barely even scratched the surface of all of the subtopics we need to dig into, which means I'm signing y'all all up for some follow-up conversations here down the line. So we're gonna go ahead and wrap things up for now. Thank you again to the three of you for your analysis and collaboration here today as we talk about the, you know, timeline of this modernized grid that is going to support, all of the evolving and digitalizing industries that we see today. And again, how utilities and ISPs need to be collaborating a little more to support those needs. So thank you again to our three panelists, doctor Dominic Meyer, founder and CEO of Look AI, Nick Tomilovich, director of distributed energy management products at Itron, and Charlie Nobles, vice president of utilities business development at Ubiquia. It's been a pleasure, the three of y'all, and we're obviously gonna be having some follow ups. So you'll hear from me soon. Thank you again to the three of you. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Appreciate it. And thank you everyone for tuning in to today's episode of Experts Talk. If you like what you heard and saw today, make sure that you're heading to market scale dot com for not only a full recap of today's episode, you can watch it back to take some notes, but also to catch up on previous conversations and to tap into our future round tables here on Experts Talk. And like I promised, I want you involved in these round tables if you're watching along and you think you have some analysis to offer on your slice of the industry, you have some thought leadership to share, I'm always fielding pitches. Hit me up at daniel dot litwin at market scale dot com. Again, first dot last, daniel dot litwin at market scale dot com. And pitch yourself. I'd love to have you on a future roundtable here on Experts Talk. So thank you again, everyone. I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of b two b. We'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of Experts Talk. And, again, I'll catch you on the next episode of Experts Talk.