Smart Enough? Building a Grid That Can Think for Itself

title: Smart Enough? Building a Grid That Can Think for Itself
author: On The Grid
contenttype: podcast
publication: On The Grid
published: 2025-08-12T18:11:36+00:00
sourceurl: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2152074132-zpryme-agency-smart-enough-building-a-grid-that-can-think-for-itself.mp3

word_count: 4970

Matt, thank you so much for being with us here again today on Z-Frime on the grid. We're always excited to talk and learn about what our partners at I-Tron are doing. So first off, for our listeners out there, just tell us a little bit about yourself and some of the work that you lead at I-Tron. Yeah, Jason. Hey, thanks for having me here and my responsibilities at I-Tron are that I run the net platform business at the company and what that means is I make sure that all of our solutions that we bring to market have the right connectivity solutions to them that we can connect devices in the field that that connection provides the right level of bandwidth, the right level of performance to meet the needs of those that those solutions so that they deliver the benefits to our customers. And so at I-Tron, we call this our intelligent connectivity solution. This means combining different types of networking technologies. Typically, that looks a lot like cellular and mesh, but also other broadband fiber technologies into a combined intelligent connectivity platform that delivers the best connection for those solutions and make sure that utilities can realize the benefits that they need for their businesses. And so this helps our utilities and cities. And so I'm responsible for that connectivity part of our overall solution. So connectivity is certainly one of the big buzzwords and trends in the industry as you like knowing it probably opens you up to getting to work across the different parts of the utility enterprise that probably takes knowing a lot about a little in some some case, especially on the networking side. So really really really leads me to a question kind of of of how your career journey led you to this space and and what other part of that? What advice do you have for someone thinking about entering the utility space? Yeah, it's interesting. I definitely didn't start off in in this sector. The early part of my career was spent mainly in the consumer electronics and PC industries, bringing you know those new products to market, you know, and and starting a lot of new businesses in those sectors, I transitioned into more internet oriented businesses in the digital music space, believe it or not, very far away from from the utility sector. But I came into the utility industry in about 2007, taking that consumer electronics customer and and internet business experience and then thinking about how that can be applied to the energy industry. I was with the first employee at a startup company that was one of the first companies to provide customers with deep insights into their energy use using the data that was collected from smart meters. And so I was able to take that customer and an internet experience and apply it in this industry. And and that company eventually got acquired by a company called Silver Spring Networks. I moved into that role and then started looking at all of the non AMI businesses, demand response, distribution, automation, and how we could provide the right communications technologies to enable, you know, and customer solutions. And then Silver Spring Networks was acquired by I Tron, which brings me to my current position and the things that I'm I'm doing now. So, you know, I definitely didn't start off in networking or in the utility industry, but I kind of found my way here. And and I think a lot of that is really due to, you know, trying to focus in on where the big problems are in society. What are the things we have to to to change and how do we electrify our transportation sector? How do we solve climate change challenges really brought me into this into this industry? And it's it's an exciting area. There's a lot of change, a lot of need for smart people in this industry. And so that would be my advice to people looking to get in is even though you may not be in here now, a lot of the skills that you may have or or developing can be applied in this industry, you know, and and actually the industry can be better from bringing that ex new expertise in and things like that. So don't hesitate to move in just because you might not be here already. Yeah, the parallels there of like your background of tech and mentioning the the digital music space and they kind of hear a lot of that in in career journeys who are really having an impact in this space where they applied technology, rapid technology technological advancement in one space. And then they come to the utility space and understand how these can benefit customers in the industry. And but often as you likely know that this is moving at a much slower pace. But it's also because this is a hundred year old plus machine in some cases. And we are working diligently to to to move it with urgency. But that comes with frustration, but they also columns with really recognizing that the broader benefit that I think we're all working on and how this impacts society. And it really brings us to a lot of the conversation we're we're having today of there's these new technologies at the forefront, whether it's AMI 2.0, obviously AI, distributor energy resources, their grid, grid intelligence, they're moving rapidly and you can take any utility, any regulator, any expert and they will have different ranks for how they see these things impacted there. So really love to get your perspective of you have this collage of industries of technologies coming together. Which ones do you think are going to have the biggest impact when you think of maybe resilience or customer engagement? Yeah, that's great. And I think you gave a good list there. And I maybe I'll start off by saying that I think AMI 2.0 that term, which is Advanced Neatering Initiative 2.0 kind of the second wave of technology coming there and grid edge intelligence. Those terms are really synonymous from an eye-tron perspective. We really see them as as the same thing. And the features that are that are new features that are being brought to the forefront with this AMI 2.0 really revolve in this edge intelligence area. What can we do by doing more processing and analysis at the edge to make the grid run better? And this takes the form of near real time insights, better insights that can be delivered directly to the customers from the meter into their home, the other Wi-Fi network. It means being able to better monitor and manage grid conditions to improve reliability and resiliency, being able to improve business operational efficiency so that the utilities can do things smarter and with less effort being able to make decisions at the edge. And so you're not out looking for problems, but you're out solving problems that you already know exists. And being able to automate the detection of safety issues before they happen, being able to bring those benefits to the customer across the board so that they feel that electricity service that they're being provided with is reliable and resilient and is there when they need it. And I think this ultimately ends up being a reduced dependency on centralized control. Certainly, there will always be centralized control. But the more that you can push policies out to the edge and make decisions, you can save time. And we've seen in many multiple technologies within the utility industry, the more you can push decision making to the edge, the faster those decisions can be made, the more improvements that you can bring. And this looks the same for customer side, voltage management, load management, the full suite of areas. And probably the other key area is when we think about how do we improve DER integration into the grid. And this will have a big impact on grid reliability overall. I think a lot of times now DERs, which might be your solar inverters or battery systems or or EVs that run on the grid have a reputation of negatively impacting grid stability. But that's because they're not really integrated with the grid. And so if you can more deeply integrate them at a technology information layer at a control layer, that's going to support better balancing of the supply and demand in real time. And and helps the grid host more renewables without compromising stability. And so these two things are going to be really important. And I think the the thing that will have the most impact on on grid reliability and customer engagement is when we combine these capabilities that you combine this intelligence sensing that comes from this next generation of meters and other devices that have edge processing in them that sit out at the edge of the grid with this ability to manage assets that may be sitting behind the meter. Then we can see a lot of advancements in terms of better operational visibility from the substation all the way down to the meter and allow for more adaptive grid operations based on real data and real situations that should bring a lot of advancements to to both rely ability and resilience. Are you finding in this conversations where the thing that seems to have taken a lot of air the room as you know data centers and this increasing demand. It seems like we might in my how I observe it is we are not taking an account these other enabling technologies just that you mentioned that with there there's a lot of great work that can be done to mitigate this as with any trend right there's something that that takes up a lot of air space and use ways and then it moves on and then eventually we settle on something that's a much more normal approach but it sounds like just from some of the things are talking about we have a real opportunity here to actually mitigate some of these impacts that are going to be I don't want to say they're overinflated but we have tools to solve this if we can kind of make sure we integrate the right technology at the edge to help mitigate some of the the demand issues growing as fast as they can is that something that you're hearing too or maybe you feel similar. Yeah I don't really see that there's a huge technology hasn't here that has crossed a lot of the technologies that we need are available today it becomes more of an integration business operational challenge I think for the utilities who are used to doing business and running operations in a set way to be able to adopt these new technologies be able to integrate those things into their existing systems update systems where they need to be updated but more importantly change their business processes to truly leverage these technologies to to an end and also develop customer engagement program strategies that will bring this broader set of resources in under their visibility and to some extent control and then also the people who own those devices if they're not traditionally grid devices if they're EV chargers or battery systems having the customers get comfortable with being part of that broader grid ecosystem is also kind of a mentality that has to be evolved and adapted and trust has to be created to to be able to bring all those things together. Thank you you mentioned earlier AMI 2.0 it is synonymous with with grid edge intelligence but I think in your opening we can describe your your career journey it might might be helpful too because I think a utility may answer definitely whereas you have this really interesting perspective of if you could and I know I'm asking a lot here maybe if you could break up AMI 1.0 versus AMI 2.0 how would you best characterize that I mean we've heard a lot about how you see 2.0 or grid intelligence but how would you really characterize what that 1.0 look like? Yeah I would say that AMI 1.0 was really focused on automating meter reading right where traditionally you used to have people walking the streets looking at meters copying down what you what the reading was and taking that back AMI 1.0 was all about automate that but let's put communications into these meters let's bring that data back have a very reliable way to collect that on a regular basis and be able to automate that so that you could reduce the cost of having you know manpower of going out and automating that read meter reading and that was a huge benefit to the utilities of taking that operational cost you know kind of off the table and automating that now in addition to that automation there was new data that was now made available in real time you know whether there was an outage whether power was restored putting that information into the operational thing and then also providing additional enhancements for customers in terms of early ways to to support demand response or other things on the utility side being able to support distribution automation communication so there were some extensions to this core AMI technology but a lot of it was really around automating the meter to cache and billing you know billing processes now as you think about AMI 2.0 it supports all of those same capabilities but the benefits of that have already been claimed for utilities so to go out and upgrade those systems there need to be additional value that's created and what that looks like is at its simplest form is using expanding the use of that meter that sensor that is sitting out at the edge of the grid in everybody's home to be able to use that as a grid operational device to understand the state of the grid at the edge traditionally utilities have monitoring down to the substation or maybe a few devices downstream from that that manage voltage or switch the flow of electricity on the grid but traditionally down the home that's a model situation they only really know what it looks like in a model they don't know the real-time state of those systems and so AMI 2.0 is about taking that sensing capability providing enhancements there and intelligence to be able to turn that meter into a grid sensor that allows for the better operation more efficient operation of a grid and understanding of what's happening and this is really critical now because it's coming at a time when most of the changes on the grid are happening at the very edge whether that be solar systems that people have put on their roofs whether that's EV chargers turning on and basically consuming the same amount of power as a third of a house you know that's a huge additional load that's coming and so being able to understand those changes where they're happening is critical to the future efficient operation of the electric grid in the future. Appreciate the breakdown there Matt we can probably do a whole series on 1.0 and like the customer stories that happen in the town halls and the disinformation of the things that people were saying too that was kind of coming in my mind as you were talking through that first journey but that's an aside here let's let's move on here on so now you're getting to work with these utilities who are embracing this right they get to leverage the sensors there and you want to pass that on to their consumers what are some of those best practices that you're seeing from those utility customers implementing this at scale. Yeah I think there's a couple key things that we see that have to be part of any solution. Number one is this edge intelligence at the grid edge. The benefit of having compute that sits in the meter is that an application framework is that those applications can change both regionally so depending on what's happening in that particular home or in that particular region you can have different apps running on the meter and the problems that you might solve with those apps today might be different than the problems you might solve with future apps in the future and so having that as a flexible edge platform for AMI20 or grid edge intelligence whatever you want to call it is really really important and so that's a foundational practice as they look to upgrade and move to the next generation of technology that's a key capability that most utilities are now looking to make sure that they have and that they can deploy you know in this wave of upgrades. The second would be making sure that your network strategies that underpin that technology are scalable and resilient and usually this means some implementation of hybrid network technologies very common or a combination of mesh and cellular technologies that are deployed but there are other combinations that make sense and ensuring that you have full coverage across both urban and rural areas in the utilities area. Utilities have a very unique challenge of how do they network these broad you know geographies of devices where they don't get to choose where the device is put they don't get to choose where the meter is on the house or where this particular power line needs to run and so they have to create communications wireless communications across a very broad area and ensure that that's reliable and redundant and so that's a key part of the solution that needs to be managed and you need to make sure that you have a strategy for doing that and Icon is in the business of helping utilities figure that out. The third area is ensuring that cybersecurity is built in at the design layer from the ground up that customers are adopting zero trust frameworks at all layers of that solution that the regular updating firmware and cryptying have done security reviews and let all those things are baked in from the ground up. Unfortunately our electrical grid is a target of many state actors and so we need to make sure that we're bringing the proper security solutions you know into those into those those solutions and those systems from the very beginning and finally is focusing on interoperability and open standards and making sure that the protocols that you use are industry standards wherever those standards as exists so that we can have multiple solutions communications that work across vendors and devices and this is typically done by most utilities of adopting a common network interface card by trying to make one of these that provides both communications and distributed intelligence but that card can be put not only in meters but it can be put in grid devices it can be put in EV chargers it can put in battery system and then you can have this common communications framework that works across these different devices and then the final thing I would say is also making sure that you're operationalizing this data for actionable insights this includes what we've talked about in terms of edge processing for basically looking for anomalies and other situations at the edge so you don't have to pull all that data back but once you capture those insights getting them back to a common data platform in the back office so that you can run proper analytics different systems can use that data and work off a common set of knowledge about how the grid is being run and operated. Thanks thanks for sharing sharing a little bit on like there would have benefits of some of the best practices and also touching on some of the key challenges there want to follow up just quickly on the the cyber component there and what are what are some of the frameworks or the organizing bodies that are helping helping kind of frame this or chart some of the the best practices that utilities can look to on there I know there's several out there but I wanted to see if you could share any that you guys work with quite frequently to help and navigate that because that's obviously a probably an increasing area because of the vulnerability. Yeah it's interesting I mean I think that certainly utilities rely a lot on on NIST which is a government agency that's providing guidance for the cybersecurity of the operation of our grid and certainly those standards that they have implemented go well well beyond the communication solutions that I try and provides but our solutions do fit into that that framework and and they provide a lot of guidance especially to the utility industry on on how to structure these systems what technologies to adapt how to evolve them over time and that's kind of a continuously changing field as as threats change as capabilities on that increase being able to respond to that in real time becomes really important there's also a broad range of consultants that I know all of the utilities tend to leverage from a security perspective while they do typically have security people on staff those people tend to be you know there's not a team of 50 people in most utilities yeah so they rely on outside consulting to not only to advise in terms of where they go but also to test and validate and do penetration tests on their systems this is a common best practice in terms of always being able to be testing and trying to break your own system so that you can figure out where the weaknesses are and revise them and so I-Tron is the same way in that way that we rely on a lot of third party security testing to validate our approach to look for holes to help us patch those holes and make sure that we do all that work before solutions you know ever see the light of day and so when they're actually put into the field they can be relied upon and be trusted yeah sounds like a pretty complicated multi-stakeholder approach but some of those groups are very very well established within the utility and then obviously a nist in the government layer so thanks for we're sharing sharing that with with the audience here I chose a global company very familiar with the smart cities work that you guys have have done but that also gives you probably a purview into how some of the emerging challenges whether it's EV charges or DERs could actually impact impact in cities and yet and leverage some of this as a platform to better provide services there so I wanted to get your your take on on how you see some of this a grid intelligence being enabler for broader smart city initiatives especially maybe where where EV adoption is moving faster in some cases in in Europe for example but wanted to get your take there Matt. Yeah interestingly the the same communications technologies that we rely upon on the utility side are also directly leverageable for cities and in some cases the city is also the utility even in North America you know there are municipalities that also run the electrical grid for the town or the local area and so all the work that we're doing for grid edge intelligence and the communications technologies there are also the provide a foundational level for smart cities either to deploy them independently as a city own network or in some cases for the utility to provide services to the city that support you know these new use cases and specifically their data backhaul for EV chargers street lighting other sensors that are valuable to the city are all things that can ride on this exact same this infrastructure network this IoT network and that will in turn enable a scalable multi application platform that that is used beyond energy metering for both utilities and cities the other thing that we see there then is that we see that utilities are working to closely align with the city electrification plans so whether that means a charging network across the city that the utility is supporting either with power or with infrastructure to enable that that electrification of the transportation sector or even supporting forecasting tools anticipate and manage those demand spikes and then there's a lot of cross cooperation happening there and then that and even take the form of deeper partnerships between utilities in some cases investor own utilities and municipalities and so we see those things increasing where we see collaborative planning the local municipality may be running up a gas or water utility and they're backhauling their information across that IOU network and the utility is supporting that initiative and getting the data to them for billing and purposes and this has a benefit on society because now you didn't need to put duplicate infrastructure out into place you're able to use what's there and transit that network for for different uses in different stakeholders. Thanks Matt so we're getting about the end here and I have one one more question for you here just if you have some time that's a lot happening many have called this like the golden age of of clean tackle or the utility transformation so many converging factors you've obviously seen that you've probably heard these stories several times before but and there's new technologies and players coming into the space there's one in here in Austin called base power they are marketing themselves as not just a battery provided but also like the next utility they're going to start with the battery and then bring your information to the home so several other theirs happy that are entering the space and are trying to put their stake in the ground to going to be only utility customer so my question for you here is to wrap us up is you know where a lot happening you know what do utilities need to do to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving space. Yeah I mean I think there's a couple of things and certainly this is an exhaustive list but from my perspective I just I think that utilities need to continue to evolve into energy platform providers moving beyond just energy delivery to orchestrating their grid including customer sighted assets like DERs battery chargers solar systems other other devices where they're bringing them under a unified centralized or distributed in this case control and thinking about them as part of a greater grid and not just delivering the energy to the customer and so we see a lot of that starting to happen that means allowing customers or sometimes called prosumers who have these assets to participate actively in those energy markets and energy ecosystems and bringing them under a single unified orchestrated grid I think is is one of the key things the second thing I would say is that those utilities need to move to a more decentralized and thanks flexible control model it doesn't mean there won't be centralized control there will always be centralized control but being able to make decisions about what data can we capture at the edge what decisions can we empower to have happen so that this whole system is more resilient it is more responsive more flexible to the local conditions which is where the changes need to have need to happen and so bringing the customer centric services under those in those flexible control models will be really critical and this includes things like utility-owned microgrids where you want to be able to protect protect a remote community and so maybe the utility sites some generation in that area that can be islanded and so that critical resources like hospitals police stations fire stations can remain powered you know when there are our challenges and so the utilities will move to a world where they're managing this two-way energy flow with dynamic pricing and creating a more responsive decentralized system and so if you're looking to try to do those two things some of the key actions that utilities should be taking are continuing to invest in this AMI-2 or grid intelligence infrastructure making sure that those networking strategies are laid out to support the needs not only today but into the future making sure that the cyber security and data governance processes are in place those initiatives are robust is really critical and then making sure that there are cross-sector partnerships that will bring the cities that will bring the EV providers that will bring other technology firms under under this under this orchestrated control will be really important and so that will will help them continue to evolve their workforce their operations their data analytics will be all part of that that solution Matt this is a bit of fascinating conversation i'm sure we could have carried on for long but we covered an unpack quite a bit there we're very grateful for your time and thank you so much for coming for coming on the z prime on the grid podcast we're very excited to share this with with our audience thank you so much for your time and looking forward to seeing you soon thank you so much