The cornerstones of grid modernization: Overcoming challenges for success

5-minute read

Quick summary: By adopting strategies focused on employee engagement and adoption, utilities can help ensure the success of even the most ambitious grid modernization programs.

The modernization of our electrical grid is crucial for ensuring reliable and efficient power delivery, not to mention for meeting the demands of Net-Zero emission goals. Utilities of all sizes are playing an active role in shaping the grid of the future through smart technologies, integration of renewable resources, grid automation solutions, and much more. All these initiatives have one thing in common: they all involve change, and not just at the leadership level. Utility employees at all levels are being tasked with adopting new technologies and innovative approaches to their day-to-day work, and it’s at this level that grid modernization initiatives will either “fly or die.”

Organizations that drive change successfully are those that devote time and resources to the human aspects: openly communicating the reasons for change, addressing concerns, giving employees a personal stake, and encouraging engagement. Those that ignore these factors run the risks of new applications going unused, new processes not being followed, and entire initiatives stalling out just short of the finish line.

Utilities are also being challenged to adapt to the needs of a shifting industry workforce. Many veteran workers are retiring, and their younger replacements demand a workplace that is committed to active employee engagement. The next generation of utility employees expects to have ownership and play an active role in organizational changes, in stark contrast to the old “command and control” approach.

According to a Gartner study, applying people-focused change management principles can

• Increase the probability of change success by 24 percent
• Decrease implementation time by 33 percent
• Increase employee engagement by 38 percent

Let’s delve into a few of the many key domains that will require a strategic approach to employee engagement if utilities are to be effective drivers of grid modernization.

Utility analytics: Cultivating a data-driven culture

At the heart of utility analytics lies the creation of a data-driven culture, which can only be achieved by effectively taking on four sizeable challenges:

• Build an enterprise understanding that data has three core phases in its lifecycle: data collection, data cleanse, and data to targets.
• Develop learning modules tailored to educate and empower individuals engaged in each phase, highlighting the phase’s critical role in driving the overall success of decision-making endeavors.
• Enable leaders to make better-informed decisions with more ease and greater confidence.
• Translate the impacts of those decisions into tangible business outcomes.

Doing all this requires providing comprehensive training and fostering employee understanding and engagement with intuitive, user-focused dashboards and analytics tools.

Constructing an enterprise environment for leaders where they embrace and trust their data will be vital to your overall transformation. Equally important, empowering operations personnel to translate data insights into improved decision-making and grid performance will ensure the connective tissue between data and insights still resides with people.

Vegetation management: Empowering field crews with mobile technology is just the first step

If equipping field crews with user-friendly mobile applications is key to effective vegetation management, understanding the eventual transformation to drone-based collection of data supporting field crews—and the implications of that model in your overall labor strategy—is paramount.

That said, early steps into implementing mobile applications for field teams should focus on two things: efficient data collection and task management.

By doing so, you’ll get your transformation off the ground while winning over crews and teams from across the enterprise by putting their needs first. Don’t let this strategy fall flat by failing to be clear that this is the first step in what will be a lengthy journey.

Limited IT support and data quality concerns pose challenges and should be assessed and addressed early to ensure your shift doesn’t fall victim to unseen technical bottlenecks. For example, robust IT infrastructure and support for mobile app usage in remote areas is critical. Imagine you’ve been told “the future is better” and your very first experience with the technology is a failure.

It’s easy to buy into the possibilities when we consider the potential for what they can unlock, but we must also consider the implications of inserting technological dependencies into human crews’ field work where before there we none.

Wildfire mitigation: Collaboration is key

Successful wildfire mitigation requires fostering collaboration across grid operations, emergency response teams, and external stakeholders. Establishing clear communication protocols for sharing wildfire risk data and implementing proactive measures, such as Public Safety Power Shutoffs in California, is essential. It’s better not to be forced to manage a PR issue in the middle of trying to stave off a wildfire.

Raising awareness among personnel and communities about wildfire risk protocols and the role of grid operations in mitigation efforts is crucial. Co-creating and providing training on using early warning systems and emergency response procedures equips personnel to handle these critical situations. By pulling your community leaders into your protocols, you build trust among the communities they support.

Utility operations: Stakeholder alignment goes beyond portfolio planning

Strategic alignment often means making sure the right people from across the organization are in the room. But what if they’re not even in the organization? Ensuring your initiative is positioned to keep pace with grid modernization expectations requires a two-pronged strategy that supports mid- and long-term planning:

1. Mid-term: Securing stakeholder buy-in and alignment

Involving key stakeholders from operations teams throughout the technology roadmap development process ensures their needs are addressed.

Miss this alignment opportunity and you open yourself up to all kinds of difficulties: From unexpected disruption to existing workflows during system integration to allowing concerns about automation-related job displacement to go unaddressed, the opportunities to lose stakeholder buy-in are limitless. Building alignment across functions and leaders will help to alleviate these concerns.

Once aligned, the key is to identify labor strategies that upskill, reskill, or, in some cases, simply take advantage of timing to allow employees nearing retirement to gracefully exit the workforce. Then help them usher in new solutions.

2. Long-term: Aligning your organization to support the grid of tomorrow.

The grid of tomorrow requires different skills, talent, labor, and technology then the 20th century infrastructure our country is running on. Aligning your organization with the needs of tomorrow will have major implications on not just the career paths of existing employees, but also the structure of the organization.

Building your organization of the future will require the recruitment of new and upcoming talent from sources that are today untapped. Identifying new labor pipelines that support up-and-coming technologies, building them where necessary, will enable your transition.

To be successful over the next 20 years of transformation, your success will be dictated by your ability to both competently execute the tasks in front of you without exhausting your existing resources AND see and build the organization that will carry us all into the second half of the 21st century.

Sustaining momentum in grid modernization