Managing Technological Change in The Utility Industry
The State of The Utility
The utility that delivers your electricity has always favored stability over agility. This has enabled the utility provide you and I power in a stable, safe and reliable way. There was a time when you and I (the consumer) valued that. We had a contract, both physical and implied, that the utility would supply us with electricity when we needed it and we would pay when we got the bill. The government, with its policies, helped to maintain that contract. Things were fine. And then it wasn’t.
Early adopters of technology have always complained about the slow rate of technological adoption by the utility industry but they have never complained about the industry’s inability to provide reliable power. What has changed in our expectations is that the consumers’ perspective on safe is now different from what the utility has always thought it was. Say what you will about climate change, I personally think it is an issue, what is obvious is that the utility is faced with a more aware populace (prosumers) who request answers from their power providers.
Long and forever gone are the days when the utility did not hear from the consumer until a bill was paid or issues existed with paying the bill. The question the utility has to ask itself now is how to factor in the requirements of a more vocal and expectant consumer in said utility’s delivery of stable, safe and reliable power.
That’s where the real work is and the complexity in making this transition lies in the scale of the change required and the technology advancement pulling that change.
Time and time again industries have proven that listening to the voice of the customer and adopting new technology can be done without losing stability. A lot more agility is required to make this happen and is possible without throwing out stability.
That stable approach to business, which the utility has always needed to maintain reliability, unfortunately leads to the stagnation that is still the case in this our large glacial industry. The technology is old; a LinkedIn search for COBOL (a programming language from the 1990’s) turns up hundreds of roles available within the utility industry. In an era when Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are within our grasp of use there is a disconnect if the industry is still hiring to maintain legacy systems and not hiring for skills of the now and the future. This highlights an issue of a demographic shift happening within the industry, ~50% of the workforce is due to retire in the next few years1. What this means is both a need to retrain the current crop of employees and a much-‐needed push to look outside the industry for new talent in the realms of user experience design and technology development.
The current approach of engaging with and stifling partners needs to change. So what is needed to embrace the change? At the most base level what is required is a shared perspective on how to approach providing power to the average consumer with a system that prioritizes
i. Maintaining a robust and money making utility industry, without unbearable increases in customer rates, due to the criticality of energy in our lives and the realization of the business forces at play.
ii. Recognizing the impact of the changes in technology and consumer expectations on the efficiency and functioning of the industry.
iii. Responding to the needs of the consumers in terms of where the energy comes from.
These three considerations should happen within an attempt at balanced policy constructs that have been applied to other critical industries like healthcare. I use healthcare as an analog because it is the other industry where there is still a physical component to the delivery of service i.e. the patient has to be in a location with proximity to service delivery. Electricity is still (as far as I know) only delivered through physical wires. The telecoms analogy, which is normally referenced – where the industry deregulated and moved from wires to wireless -‐ does not directly apply here. A new policy approach will be required. This will also not be easy. As evidenced by a recent report by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) slower growth in consumer demand, recent low natural gas prices and renewable energy friendly policies have led to new types of generation coming onto the grid (see graph below). For an industry that has been used to a certain way of doing things and, is still heavily regulated by policy, these changes continue to be tough to handle maintaining a ‘business as usual’ approach.
Costly new generation technologies at the same time as dropping electricity prices (see image below) reduce the utility’s incentive to expend capital. Unsurprisingly, keeping the business alive becomes the priority at the expense of the core element of customer service. And customers are now demanding service.
So changes have to be made; business model changes that recognize the facts above, technological adoption that is forward thinking and not just reactive and a mindset shift that recognizes the ability to be both agile and reliable at the same time. The rest of the world has accepted this and it is time for the utility industry to do the same. The transition will not be easy (as it is currently playing out) but it needs to be done, it is too critical for that not to be the case. In the next few sections I will share a framework for technology adoption in the utility industry.
Digitization
Like in many industries before it, the utility is becoming digitized. The simple premise of generating electricity, passing it over wires and charging the consumer for using that electricity has become less about the energy and more about information flow.
The bits are becoming more important than the electrons as the digitization trend kicks into quick gear. According to strategyand (PWC), Generation C (connected) will be the first generation to have grown up in a digital world connected to the web and they will make up a good chunk of the consumer base soon. There are three main drivers fueling digitization; the pull for this from the consumer, the push by the technology itself to continue to expand its influence -‐ a concept made popular by David Kelly in ‘What Technology Wants’ -‐ and the economic benefits that can be obtained through efficiencies created by digitization.
Due to this state of digitization we are currently witnessing an exciting trend of ‘unbundling’ in the energy industry – a phenomena that is helping to propel innovation from the bottom of the industry. By bottom I mean startups. Most industries go through a cycle of bundling and unbundling2. The bundling period can be identified by the dominance of a few big companies; it is the period when ‘conglomerates’ are formed as bigger players in an industry acquire their smaller competitors. It is more commonly known by the phrase industry is consolidating.
This is happening in the peripheral utility sectors like retail electricity and in old technology consolidation like Exelon acquiring Pepco3. The unbundling period, however, is when the smaller companies start to pick out areas of need and address unexplored avenues in the field. Smaller companies start to compete against the conglomerates and this is the period we are in right now.
2 https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-‐to-‐succeed-‐in-‐business-‐by-‐bundling-‐and-‐unbundling/
3 http://www.pepcoholdings.com/library/templates/Interior.aspx?Pageid=87&id=6442458949
4 P’s Approach
The unbundling is aided by improving technologies, changing customer needs and complacency of the incumbents. This unbundling phase tends to facilitate and foster innovation. Right now, the energy industry is in the early throes of unbundling and the evidence is all around us. From energy generation (seen in the increasing adoption of solar energy and even kinetic energy conversion into electricity in wearables), and energy storage (on site storage for residential consumers and grid scale storage for commercial businesses), to fuel sources for vehicles (electric and plug-‐in hybrid electric vehicles) and microgrids (localized supply and demand of energy), unbundling is happening across the spectrum of the energy industry and there is pressure from new players to open up the market. The old guard might still be winning in some instances but for the most part the pressure is coming from the consumer to change the relationship with the utility. The change is inevitable and a new approach to handling it is required. My suggested approach considers four factors in determining the impact of technology. I call it the 4 P’s and the approach centers around asking questions within the four factors of
1. People:
a. How is technological change impacting consumers?
b. How is technological change impacting employees?
2. Product:
a. How is technological change impacting our product?
b. How is technological change impacting how we deliver our product?
3. Performance (including processes)
a. How is technological change impacting our ability to deliver product?
b. How is technological change impacting delivery of product?
4. Policy
a. Does the current policy impede or enhance the adoption of the technology?
b. What changes to policy are required to ensure consumers benefit from the technology?
The questions foster a requirement to understand what technological changes are actively happening within society, they require analysis beyond the four walls of the utility. Once the technological changes or new technologies have been listed the analysis then moves on to answering the questions above to determine which element will see the most positives or negatives from the new technology. An example; if the new technology is a new form of energy generation (packets of power from pollen) analysis would show that, of the 4 P’s, Product would be most affected. This would show up on a radar chart (some examples below) in relation to the impact on the other factors. Decisions and prioritization can then be determined from this. The graphs below show a simple heuristic for assessing the impact a certain technology will have on the sector. To learn more on how this works reach out to me at seyi@asha-‐labs.com.
The next few chapters provides some more context for how using the 4P’s enables the utility continue to serve its stakeholders with stable, safe and reliable energy. We will consider some new technologies of the day.
People and Change
The evolving form of engagement between the new type of consumer – one who receives their services real-‐time or near real-‐time and have expectations that their technology will serve their needs – and the utility – still grappling with all the changes outside of the industry that is causing this shift in consumer expectation -‐ is pushing changes that the old utility is handling poorly. This impacts People, both consumers and employees.
HOW IS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IMPACTING CONSUMERS?
Automated customer support has always been utilized in the utility industry. What made it so woeful was the lack of empathy or understanding of nuance and context in the interactions between the customers and the ‘voice on the end of the phone’. According to a Voxeo report from 2013, about 70% of customer calls to the utility are related to customer billing. When a customer calls, to have an unhelpful and automated voice on the other end aggravates consumers even more. The industry move towards combining call centers with automated responses did not help much as this pushed costs up without improving the customer service performance. That is all about to change with the advent of Artificial Intelligence. An example from outside the industry (an approach that is necessary to move this industry forward is borrowing from outside the industry) is the GoButler app, which up until March 2016 employed humans to respond to customer support requests like ordering food etc. The same customer service employees were partners in creating the fully automated app that the business is now employing to serve its customers. The employees helped to train the artificial intelligence in implementing the requests and bookings that GoButler customers had. This model can be replicated by the utility. There is enough data available, from decades of customer support, to train AI to provide customer service with full context (age, employment situation, marital status etc.). I personally look forward to berating a robot instead of a helpless employee if or when there is an error on my power bill.
HOW IS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IMPACTING EMPLOYEES?
Lets move on to the talent and employee realm of technological change impact. My perspective is that this is where the most work lies in this transition. A company and its product are only as good as the people hired to create that product. A lot has changed in the world of work outside of the utility industry. The industry is still hierarchical to the point of gridlock and tied to legacy (systems and approaches); both recipes for disaster. I’ll suggest that the real risk to the industry is not renewable generation or unrealistic consumer expectations. The real risk is in how powerless the workforce is (excuse the pun).
'The core of any revolution in the way that work gets done is, inevitably, (as a result of) changes in energy. When true innovations occur in the production of goods or services, they are the result of a capacity to unearth new sources of energy or to apply existing sources in a radically more efficient way'.
That quote above from 'The Shift' by Linda Gratton applies to the utility industry at this point. The quote is both literal and metaphoric. It's happened before; steam and the onset of engine science for transport and industry led to the need for professional qualifications (engineers, floor men or train drivers) to manage the steam engines. It's happening again right before our very eyes... at an increasing pace all across the energy industry. And it's not just because of low oil prices, which are as cyclical as the moon. In May of 2015 Siemens announced 4500 jobs would be slashed on the power and gas side of their business but it was not just because of the changes in energy utilization and type of energy. I'll suggest that more than the changing nature of energy, the huge loss of jobs happening in the energy industry is tied to the changing nature of The Firm (due to the impact of technology) as theorized by Ronald Coase in 1937. Coase suggests that if a firms costs (trust, friction, information etc.) of doing business with entities within said firm are lower than the costs of doing work with entities outside said firm, then more of the work will be brought within the firm, and this leads to an increase in the size of the firm.
The opposite applies nowadays; the costs of doing business with people outside a firm have dropped dramatically and are now dropping astronomically in the utility industry. For example not many firms have in house lawyers nor develop the technological tools they use internally, essentially reducing the need for more employees and large sized firms. As humans we underestimate the impact of technology. All the time. In the utility industry we grossly underestimate the impact of technology. The DOUGs (Dear Old Utility Guys) of the industry do not even remotely understand how much things are changing. I've spent 14+ years in this industry, I think I get it but I'm sure I'm underestimating the impact. Up until I connected that paragraph from 'The Shift', the Siemens announcement and several other technology announcements relating to the changing nature of work due to technology, I'd failed to realize how much of a revolution is occurring in our lives/society due to the increasing pace of solar deployment, advances in batteries, sensors, energy storage and 'energy as data'4.
So what will happen next? As we rely on newer and more sustainable sources of energy we will start to think of energy more in terms of the 'informational value' (how much and when you use energy is very important to the utility) and less about the energy itself. The skills required to play a part in this 'new form' of the industry will be more specialized and there will be fewer people from within the industry that possess the skills to 'add value' in the workforce. A simple illustration: with old electricity meters you required meter readers -‐ several human beings -‐ to physically go to customers homes to write down how much power customers used. This led to a utility that had to hire thousands of field workers. With smart meters you need fewer more qualified employees (say data scientists) to report and analyze the power usage information from thousands of consumer homes. Even in cases where humans are collecting data from meters their devices will be more efficient. Changes in 'energy' and how it is used will lead to a change in how work is done and who does it. But this is not to suggest that the current utilities will go away. In fact, claims of the utility death spiral are overblown and premature. What will happen is that there will be companies at either end of the 'barbell'; on one end big utilities that have large assets -‐ and consequently large number of employees -‐ and on the other end of the barbell there will small assetless utilities that focus on the 'energy as data/information' end of what a utility provides. The type of skills required in the utility industry is changing, new firms that require fewer more qualified people will compete with the large ones who will not die but will have to adapt and need to train their old employees or acquire skilled workers from other industries.
4 http://seyifabode.com/future-‐utility-‐pt3/
Something we know is that the best and brightest do not want to work for the utility industry. This is at the same time as the industry is losing the bulk of its talent through retirement. A different mindset of hiring is required. Not to suggest that there is a need to ignore the need for reliability maintaining the grid and power supply but there is a need to futurecast to understand where the technological infrastructure layer is going. The mistake will be to hire people from technology that is currently the trend. An example: A utility looking to build a new customer data platform decides to hire employees who code in the ‘new and trendy’ Ruby on Rails. But Ruby on Rails is no longer the trendy platform it once was. Not to suggest that Ruby on Rails is not a good platform, what is required is a perspective on which platform is robust enough to handle the needs and expectations of a fast changing customer base. There is also a need to get rid of our egos in the industry, by this I mean a willingness to employ people out of other industries that we would traditionally not engage with.
Employment incentive structures also need to be modified to adapt to this new paradigm of work and type of employee. Stock options, with a belief that there is a payday somewhere in the future, are commonplace in the world the best technologists and user experience designers currently work in. It might be time for our industry to start considering this as a bigger part of how we convince talented people to flock to an industry that needs their skills. There is also the ability to convince them they are truly working on impactful technology. What is more impactful than the energy that powers everything you and I do…
Product
HOW IS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IMPACTING OUR PRODUCT?
The changes in technology call for a fundamental change in how we see and deliver the commodity that is electricity. Fundamental architecture has to change to cater to the move from personal computers and one-‐way interactions to mobile and community engagements respectively. A realization setting across the industry is that automation is becoming embedded in almost all the services and products that the vast majority of our customers are engaging with. Wearables are everywhere, the connected home is the buzzword du-‐jour and there is a lot of talk and a lot more movement than has been seen before now in the world of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (AR). What does this mean for the technological infrastructure of the utility industry? There are basically three buckets within the industry where the most impact will be felt. These are i) Energy generation and supply optimization ii) Bi-‐Directional data output & collection and iii) Customer services and support. I discuss how we handle these areas of impact below.
· Energy generation and supply optimization: On the generation and supply side, until we have drastic changes in the sources of energy generation or storage, we will be tied to both the fossil (coal) and renewable (wind, solar, geothermal etc.) sources of electricity. Nuclear, while not damaging the atmosphere in the short term, is dangerous and not renewable. New forms of energy generation are not here yet but the methods and the modes of capturing and generating the energy we need will factor in these new
technologies like storage. The most obvious opportunities here have been captured in the command center operations of the utility; smart meters and responsive devices on the transmission lines and turbines enable the control room operators to only deploy technicians to site at the optimal time to handle tasks that are well defined before the technician goes out there. Data and analysis is preventing wasted operating time
· Energy generation and supply optimization: Gone are the days when technician or linesmen had to be trained for years before they could perform basic maintenance tasks; with Virtual Reality employees can be trained through simulations of the tasks they will be facing on the ground in their day-‐to-‐day roles and with Augmented Reality there is the opportunity to embed the instructions right before the technicians eyes right onsite. The approach here can be staggered, the risk rating determines which tasks can and will be initially ushered into the transition bucket for new recruits trained using these new technologies. There is also the ability to augment the capabilities of the technicians with trained artificial intelligence that uses voice commands through wearables to walk the technician through the process of repairing a line, turbine or gearbox. This is the new paradigm.
· Bi-‐Directional data output and collection: The advent of the smart grid, an information technology layer laid over the energy transmission systems pioneered by IBM, heralded the beginning of a bi-‐directional exchange of information between the utility and the consumer. Most utilities are still not quite set up to do much with this capability. The deluge of giga and terabytes of data received every day from thousands of points on the grid has led utilities to scramble for assistance. More utilities have chosen to work with consumers due to need and incapability to handle the deluge, than actual desire to partner with more technologically advanced companies. This bi-‐ directional transfer of data and information will continue and increase. With the advent of VR & AR and the strong push by companies like Google who know how to handle the deluge of data and want to ‘own’ the connected home5, utilities will be forced to embrace the adoption of these technology by their consumers as methods to engage with them in their homes (AR to visualize energy usage for example) and collect data about their behavior in their homes. With the deployment of AR and VR will come the need to deploy beacons and sensors at a scale that the utility has up to this point not had to do, that will have to be handled as part of the required infrastructure to ensure smooth delivery of service. This is the new paradigm of what service.
5 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-‐google-‐cleverly-‐becoming-‐your-‐future-‐power-‐utility-‐seyi-‐fabode?trk=mp-‐reader-‐card
Performance and Processes
HOW IS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IMPACTING OUR ABILITY TO DELIVER PRODUCT?
As emphasized in the chapter on how technology is impacting industries, it is evident that there is a need for a new approach to strategic decision making by utilities in this new age. Especially a new strategic direction for the utility business model as a whole. Some radical approaches will be required, to be shared in the futurecasting segment, but first off there needs to be some modification of the current way of doing things as we transition to the future.
Strategy: Decisions will have to be that affect the strategic direction the utilities want to take, the type of employees the utility will need to get there and the processes needed. This will require a new paradigm. One that is focused on
1. Empowering employees at the point of contact with the customer to be able to make decisions. This will involve augmenting with technology that allows the employee to decide what the next course of action should be in real-‐time. An example is the energy audit process for the average home. Installation of products that improve the well being of a customer, even if it is not in the remit of the utility, will build customer loyalty and ensure that there is engagement that builds loyalty. With the increased push towards a more customer centric approach will come a need to work at speeds that acknowledge this change. Gone are the days of responding to customer queries within 24 hours and hoping they are happy or elated to hear from the utility. The expectation now is real-‐time and with that comes the need to deploy solutions to issues, including technological glitches like billing errors or power outages, real-‐time or near real-‐time. The utility model change is as much a technological change as it is a service model change. A decision making hierarchy that is wholly geared towards approval before action is one that is more focused on satisfying the corporation than satisfying the customer; in the new age of enterprise which the utility wants to play in this is a recipe for failure.
2. Strategic decisions around the process of development of new models that recognize the changing nature of customer expectations and technology. A predictive approach, replacing the reactive approach that currently exists, will be needed. The telecom industry is moving into the customized billing and contract package approach; with the implementation of smart energy monitoring and management there will be a need to customize engagements. Averages – your neighbor does x so do y -‐ do not matter for most consumers in the future of this industry. Team structures to implement the strategy also have to change. It is not any good to call for strategy that requires quick execution and maintain a bureaucratic structure that prevents a developer from pushing code to the test database unless ten people sign off. This would be a recipe for losing the talent that the industry needs to attract to compete in the future economy.
HOW IS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IMPACTING DELIVERY OF PRODUCT?
Customer support using Blockchain: I was recently at a 2-‐day workshop where a utility was discussing providing third party access to customer data. The session was my first of such having just moved to a new state with a desire to continue
to contribute to moving the utility sector into the future6. You would have thought the utility was talking about the numbers to the nuclear code in how protective they were of the energy usage data of the poor consumers. Unfortunately I left with more questions than answers about how to get customers to a point where they get the user experience that considers their context/lives7 as we consume energy daily.
Don’t get me wrong, consumer usage data is private and should be owned by the consumer, but in the hierarchy of data that evil actors require to commit their evil acts we should all be honest with ourselves and admit that how much energy Joe B used on a Thursday at 1pm ranks well below where Joe B used his credit card. We, collectively, as an industry should move from a fear based approach to engaging with 3rd party service providers, who are not ‘members’ of our elite club in the industry to a collaborative approach to ensuring we serve consumers. This approach can be aided by the adoption of Blockchain technology. The event had a very diverse group of stakeholders all interested in seeing things improve but the sense I got from the 2 days of conversation was the Texas utility believes that
o All third party service providers are out to ‘get’ the consumer
o There is a realization by the utility (but little incentive) of the need to change how it currently operates as it relates to providing data access to service providers. And (the most critical point)
o Little to no consideration of 'Voice of the Customer’ is present in these conversations we continue to have about said customer. We have the utilities on one side and the vendors on the other.
The utility takes a stance that the customer should be protected to an extent that is, if not totally unnecessary, is excessive. The utility’s view is that 3rd party entities that want access to consumer data are out to invade the consumer’s privacy, act as a middleman between said consumer and the utility and desire to commit some fraudulent act with the consumer’s data. There is some overkill here; for someone who is intent on committing a crime, 15 minute interval energy usage data is a lot less valuable than intercepting the security camera video stream from the consumer's home.
Image courtesy of http://hespro.lbl.gov/pro/
7 http://www.asha-‐labs.com/blog/2015/10/16/mobile-‐engagement-‐utilitys-‐achilles-‐heel
On the other side are the 3rd party service/product providers who are interested in using tools and techniques (behavioral psychology, gamification, user experience design etc.) to help consumers reduce their energy usage and expenses. How do they get to run their businesses doing the things that we know the utility (as a business) is not set up to do well? So how do we get to a point where the utility gets it’s desired outcome in the form of privacy and fraud protection for the consumer and the 3rd party vendors get access to data that enables them aid the consumers (and run their businesses)? I propose adoption of the Blockchain.
Before you click away, I said Blockchain not Bitcoin (the maligned and still misunderstood cryptocurrency). Blockchain is simply a centralized ledger or a read only distributed database. Blockchain takes over the ‘customer storage’ function that the utility currently plays. It is an immutable historical record of transactions or usage data in this particular case. The Blockchain technology combines peer-‐to-‐peer networks, distributed systems, Hashing functions, public/private key cryptography and cryptographic signatures (amongst other cryptographic techniques). These are not new technologies just cleverly combined. Blockchain is being adopted in industries like finance and healthcare where (I dare suggest) consumer data is more critical than in the utility industry. By using Blockchain to provide consumer usage data to 3rd party vendors the utility provides
· Fraud protection and detection
· Consumer anonymity and
· Privacy
· And enables trust in a system that is being run without a middleman.
If implemented properly it’s a win-‐win-‐win situation for all involved; the utility gets to ‘protect’ the consumer, the vendors get access to consumer data that is encrypted unless the consumer enables full disclosure and the all important consumer gets the benefit of cutting edge services from 3rd party vendors. This new technology enables us all to focus on the important task of moving us towards more sustainable energy usage. Granted, our industry is not the most friendly towards new technology but we have an opportunity to create new business models and increase consumer satisfaction by peeking round the corner and borrowing from industries that are currently serving the new kind of empowered (energy) consumer.
Policy
Does the current policy impede or enhance the adoption of the technology? And what changes to policy are required to ensure consumers benefit from the technology? These two questions go hand in hand when it comes to the policy element of adopting technology in the utility industry. An overarching approach here is to view the technology on its individual merit rather than assess a broad swathe of technology as being good or bad for the populace. As is the case with all policy related conversations, it is nuanced.
Policymakers and utilities, for the most part, have not been the best of friends. Policymakers have taken the approach that utilities are ‘out to get’ the consumer. I won’t dwell on the truth or otherwise of this view of the utility but I will suggest that it has always led to contentious and oftentimes time wasting stalemates between the utility and policymakers to the detriment of the constituent everyone claims to be serving; the customer.
In the new age of utilities, this approach, even if it were true, will not work. A utility that does not place the consumer at the center is bound to go out of business and policy/policymaker issues will be the least of their concerns.
On the policymaker side, the goal should be to develop policies and create a policy environment that encourages the move towards a distributed network. It is what technology wants. Considering the amount of evidence that is available to determine customer benefits over the last few years, an evidence-‐based approach to policy making is a start and supporting that with some futurecasting.
A Little Futurecasting
To define what role the utility will play in our future we have to do some Imagineering or futurecasting, as I like to call it. A future where the questions raised above have been answered to the best of the utility and the customer is still served with stable, safe and reliable. So here goes a little futurecasting.
SHORT STORY: YOUR CONNECTED HOME IN 2020
It was crazy to think there was a time that it had been called the smart home. She could not remember when the clever marketing sleight of hand happened and it had become the ‘Connected Home’. She was living in it now though. It had become almost jarring in its normalcy.
People had laughed when the female head of DARPA announced her team had created energy packs that could power the hundreds of devices we all now owned. People stopped laughing when she announced that the worlds largest utilities had essentially become resellers of her energy packs. Initially we all thought of them as batteries. But they weren’t batteries, they were much more. DARPA head lady had used that analogy so we could all get familiar with what was actually game-‐changing technology. She’d wrapped familiar context around it. Thank her stars she was as much a storyteller as she was a scientist, otherwise Motes would have died at the altar of contextless technologies like Google Glass and The Segway.
Motes. They sounded harmless enough at the time. No one expected such tiny things to disrupt the power utility business model. And so suddenly too. One day the utilities were pretending Motes did not make their assets obsolete, next day they were scrambling to license the technology and resell it across the world. The utilities loved that it opened up new markets and opportunities at a time when everyone was declaring their business models obsolete. Now it was everywhere. You didn’t have to reorder when your supply of Motes ran out. The drones delivered it. Once you opened it they automatically spread throughout your home and took up their pre-‐programmed duties. They were self-‐ powering and could transfer some of their energy to the assigned device. Temp Motes measured your home temperature and communicated with your walls to increase or reduce the temperature because your Body Motes let the Wall Motes know that, even though today was a cold day, Jane was feeling terribly hot. Jane laughed. She knew her Body Motes had already sent this information to Dr. Seidler who’d now moved to South Carolina because New York was too crowded.
He’d always complained about how crowded New York was. Once the mirrors in newly built homes became embedded with teleconferencing capability and the motes were mass market he could have ‘house calls’ from anywhere in the world Dr. Seidler moved and was never coming back to New York. Truth be told Jane liked the new house calls too. She’d never liked doctor’s offices. There was something about the perceived griminess of the magazines from the hundreds of unwashed hands flipping through when they came for their hospital visits that always made her feel less healthy when she walked out of the doctor's office than when she’s walked in... She went to the mirror to brush her teeth, touched up her hair and changed into a collared shirt but kept the pj bottoms on. It amazed her how, despite all the changes that technology had wrought, there were still clients in developing countries who frowned on casual ‘work’ clothes. They’d come round. She grew up in a time when it took about 5 or so years for technology and cultural transfer across the world. Now it took months. She needed it to happen sooner.
Poogle was shipping Virtual Reality headsets embedded with Energy Motes across the globe. The ambient experience in the VR headsets could not replace the ‘normalcy’ of sitting in front of a connected mirror for most people though. We still loved sitting in front of mirrors anyway. So maybe VR would not catch on. The energy requirements of an additional device in the home was also something that she knew would be an impediment. Despite the new Wi-‐Fi and low Bluetooth energy requirements of all the devices, nothing could still beat a simple Virtual Mote that converted the mirror into wherever you wanted it to be..
Just as she was about to dial into her meeting from the mirror the robotic cleaner came on. She’d totally forgotten it activated once the Dirt Motes sensed dirt in the house. 'Albert off’ she whispered. ‘Resume in 45 minutes’. The whirring stopped. That was something else that wasn’t going to change despite all the advances in technology; the whirring sound of the vacuum-‐cleaning robot. The manufacturers (or the robots that worked in the manufacturing plant) had
included sounds because, for some reason, we all still wanted to ‘hear the house being cleaned’. Humans, we yearned for the simplest things..
She dabbed some more water on her face. She was still hot. She knew Dr. Seidler’s robot nurse would recommend a new food regimen for her once Body Mote sent the latest biomedical data to his office in the next 10 seconds. She’d rejected the ‘all-‐ in-‐one’ tasteless food drinks. She still wanted to crunch carrots and cook her brown rice. She wondered what he’d add to her diet. She also wondered how she’d adjusted to this knowledge that machines would know she was pregnant before her partner did.'Funny how easily we adjust to new things once we understand the benefits and it delivers on it’s promise' she thought.
She waited for the delivery of fruits she knew the fridge had ordered since she’d run out this morning, lunch was in 3 hours but she was already hungry and needed a nibble. She was eating for 3 now. She selected a virtual key and it was transmitted to the food delivery drone, she remembered how different it was before we all got smart locks and had to wait for the UPS guy between 9 -‐ 2pm missing half a work day waiting for a delivery.
The lights dimmed everywhere else in the house and would stay that way for the 45min duration of her meeting to conserve energy. Jane dialed into…
Conclusion
The goal here is to provide a framework for accessing technological change to move the utility industry forward. The utility industry is poised to transition to this future better than anyone else despite how things look. What technology wants is to exist and, as an industry that is out to serve the customer, we must adopt the best technology and avoid the mistakes of the past. These mistakes came from adopting a ‘corporation first’ approach. In a world where the consumer should come first, infact demands to come first, this approach will lead to failure. Failure is not an option for the most important, and possibly most impactful, industry in our technologically driven world.
