The Monitoring Gap Putting Tomorrow at Risk

Summary: Utilities (and really all organizations) need to adopt sophisticated real-time monitoring systems to handle the increasingly complex demands of like distributed energy resources, AI data centers, and climate disruptions, but successful system implementation requires better digital adoption platforms and organizational support systems to help teams effectively use new systems. See "What You Should Do" at the end of this post.

Over the next 3, 5, 10 years - do you expect your air conditioning to keep working reliably in the summer and your home heating in the winter? There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to ensure that they do, and so far the outlook looks mixed.

Everything’s getting more complicated as society and our economies mature. We’ve got software evolving quickly, we’ve got equity increasingly in mind, and we’ve got climate disruptions to adapt to.

All of those things intersected in the news today - all in one day - and I want to tell you briefly about it. It’s not only interesting, it’s important!

A Complicated Parable

Gartner says the only thing harder than selling enterprise software, is buying enterprise software. (It’s complicated!) It turns out it’s also very hard to use enterprise software, and now we are seeing that cause problems in our ability to implement adaptations to climate change.

This is both a parable for every industry and literally true: Power generation and distribution needs to modernize in order to support a more complex world sustainably. Power generation has historically been inefficient and is about to face huge new demands from a world full of AI data centers and electric vehicles.

While there are significant technologies available to help power generating utilities level up, implementation of tech by humans is a bottleneck. Luckily there are emerging best practices is supporting technology adoption and if those best practices are deployed to support adaptation of the power grid, we’d all be a heck of a lot better off in the coming years.

That’s as simple as I can explain it. Here’s a short version of the specifics. If you don’t work in energy, I’d suggest this is still valuable to consider for your field.

Real Time Adaptation

A new report was published this week by the nonprofit trade group Energy Systems Integration Group. It got good press but I want to put it in context. It was titled Long-Term Load and DER [Distributed Energy Resources] Forecasting: Use Cases, Barriers, and Recommendations for Scalable Deployment.

It found that real time supply and demand network monitoring is what the most sophisticated utilities are adding to their forecasting and planning. More and more people are generating their own power at home and selling it back into the grid, weather is going haywire, and everyone wants more power.

There’s a wide range of sophistication, though, among utilities and related stakeholders. Many aren’t yet doing real time (hourly) planning and are still just forecasting based on past annual demand, peak demand, and historical weather patterns.

Report lead author Julieta Giraldez explains in this excellent webinar that various stakeholders have and need different levels of time based monitoring.

Giraldez told Renewable Energy World that the most important takeaway from the report is: "Understanding how much is at risk if forecasting approaches don’t evolve... Relying on outdated methods not only introduces risk but can actively create problems for the grid and its customers.

"Modernizing forecasting is no longer optional; it’s essential." Meanwhile, there’s enough maturity in the field of real time measurement, including of home-based distributed energy resources, that in separate but related news GridX (which has raised $69M) announced that it has acquired Innowatts (estimated $26M raised), a real-time monitoring technology that specializes in AI analysis of consumer demand and distributed energy resources. That acquisition might even be a sign of a maturing (or stalling) market more than early validation of one, in fact.

But Software is Hard to Use

The aforementioned research on utility adaptation to an increasingly complex world finds that implementation of new systems and tech presents challenges, though.

Years ago it was said software would “eat the world” - but most software still requires humans to operate it (thank goodness) and humans don’t always have an easy time adopting new systems.

Luckily, Vasupradha Srinivasan at Forrester Research wrote today about increasingly mature efforts to mitigate this problem, too. They wrote that savvy firms (in general, not focusing on the energy industry) are building Centers of Excellence to lightly centralize utilization of what are called Digital Adoption Platforms.

Those are powerful help-tip overlay type systems like WalkMe (which SAP acquired last year for $1.5B) and Pendo, which has raised more than $350M. These systems are dedicated to making it easier for software users to use complicated software. Think onboarding site tours, and more. That’s big business now!

Adjacent to that, OpenAI just paid $1B today to acquire a startup that makes it easier for developers to make software that's easier for users to use. So everyone's trying very hard right now to make software easier to use!

And if centers of excellence in use of digital adoption platforms can help scale the knowledge and culture needed for people who work for utilities to adopt real time power generation and distribution software, then we’ll all have much better odds of adapting to global warming with less discomfort than we are going to experience otherwise.

This is one part of what climate adaptation can look like.

What Your Company Should Do

What can your company, utility, or organization do to thrive in this kind of future? Here are some recommendations. We can help you with any of these, too.

• Modernize Your Forecasting & Planning

  • Don’t just rely on historical trends. Incorporate real-time data, scenario analysis, and forward-looking indicators into how you plan for demand, supply, and resources. There's a great case study on the Feedly blog about a beverage company doing this to deal with climate disruption, but my team and I can help you with this too. We set up monitoring systems for your business ecosystem.

• Invest in Real-Time Monitoring

  • Whether it’s energy use, supply chains, or customer engagement, build systems that can sense and respond as things change — not just after the fact. We're big advocates of real time monitoring of partners, competitors, and target accounts.

• Anticipate the Human Bottleneck

  • Assume that new tools won’t be adopted smoothly. Budget time, training, and change-management resources alongside the technology investment itself. Ideally, co-creation of systems with end users will be an investment that supports adoption. Adoption isn't an afterthought.

• Consider Building a Center of Excellence (COE)

  • You could create a small team that lightly centralizes best practices for new tech adoption. Their role: make it easier for every department to adopt tools consistently without stifling flexibility. Ask me about Gartner's advice on how to democratize the skill of data synthesis for insight generation. It's the coolest thing I ever heard at a tech conference and we'd love to help you put together a system based on that model.

We’re living in a time of major change! Let’s execute through it as effectively as possible, shall we?