Kathleen Wolf Davis | Nov 11, 2014

Energy Central's 9th annual Knowledge Summit kicked off on Tuesday, November 11 with an opening session that painted a picture of the future of utilities.

Lee Krevat, director of client technology solutions and optimization and non-traditional growth at SDG&E; Michael Guyton, senior VP and CCO at Oncor; Johan Rambi with Alliander (in the Netherlands), and Chuck Tickles, retired VP of technology with KCP&L sat together to discuss the topic for an hour-long panel Tuesday morning.

"Our customers will want to talk to us on all the avenues and through all the venues you can think of," Guyton began. "They want information in new ways. They want real-time information, and they will demand it."

Oncor is already doing pilots with texting programs that alert customers about outages with 100,000 customers to find those avenues, too.

Tickles, who spent 34 years in the utility industry, added that all of the future is about focus-on the customer, as Guyton noted, but also on technology (as reflected in Oncor's texting program, too).

"For the last 30 years, we've been talking about the utility model changing, but it's always been regulatory-driven in these discussions," he said. "The remodeling idea was always pushed down from larger governmental perspectives. This is the first time the change, the reshaping is being driven by our customers."

He noted that the utility industry provides the least amount of customer information, traditionally, because we've always been focused internally. There hasn't been a focus on the data and the value of that data for customers.

But, that's all changing-including the control and ownership of the grid and the "engineering paradigm" of the power grid. Unfortunately, Tickles sees some utilities a bit behind in recognizing that shift and preparing for it.

Rambi discussed the need for change and focus in a utility's future organization and how Alliander shifted their own utility toward a smart grid and IT/OT convergence perspective-and, of course, as Guyton began the panel, also with the rising customer expectation, which isn't restricted to a U.S. customer demand.

"There's a new role for us here: how to predict these new items and how to put it into a model and plan for it," he said. "And international collaboration is key for this. We're working with utilities in the U.S., Europe and Asia to share information. This is a global change."

Krevat asked the panel what he deemed a "tough question" involving the influx of retail competition and whether the traditional utility customer is "up for grabs."

"We have a good relationship with our customers," Guyton answered. "We know what they think, but our survival will be getting ahead of [other players] in the industry."

Guyton noted that this is a regular discussion at his utility-how to balance resiliency and low prices along with ways to stave off competition.

"We've not done a good job of communicating to our customers that what we supply has real value," he said. "It's cheaper than Starbucks, per day, on average. But, customers don't really see the value."

"Utilities tend to think in terms like MW, base generation and transmission. For us to start thinking about the individual customer-rather than a commodity basis-this is such a different concept to build systems, data structures and communications to do that. It's a big, big shift in planning," Tickles added.

"All of our planning assumptions have to be different now, and most customers think of it as their grid, not ours," he continued.

"It's also their data," Rambi added to Tickles comment. "You must be flexible in how to deal with their data and how they want to let you use that data. It's a culture shift, a shift in attitude. Rather than telling [the customer] what's best for them, we have to be open to experiment, ask customers how we can support them and learn to communicate."

Being transparent, according to Rambi was the biggest lesson Alliander has learned from this culture shift and focus on customers.

The Knowledge Summit continues this week in Newport Beach, California. Learn more at the website www.knowledgesummits.com. Plus, track it all on twitter #KnowledgeSummits.

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