The U.S. electric utility industry faces a pivotal moment.
The demand for cleaner electric energy grows each year with the electrification of transportation, space conditioning, vertical agriculture, industrial processes, and hyper-scalers. Some say that America will double its current peak demand requirements by 2050. If that is half right, it’s a huge effort.
In addition, we need to replace aging assets, support the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), provide resilience against high-impact storms and wildfires, and employ emerging technologies like robots, advanced conductors, super-conductors and artificial intelligence (AI) to build and expand a robust electric transmission and distribution (T&D) grid. These challenges and opportunities have a compounded impact on the current planning, design, operations, and maintenance of our complex grid that needs to deliver sustainable, reliable and affordable energy to more and more large and sophisticated loads coming from, in some cases, new and unique customer classes. Making large investments like these requires a careful and consistent evaluation of the total cost of ownership because, according to Warren Buffet:
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
