Tips & News - Winter- 2019

“I’ve always been in this space because it’s really important in terms of how we use energy as well as water, because they are very important to human life itself. So it’s very near and dear to my heart. I have been in these verticals pretty much all of my career.” - Kumi Premathilake

are predicted to be non-traditional sources of energy. Over the last 100 years, we’ve taken electricity and the grid overall for granted. Today, that age is showing up in terms of more outages—caused by severe weather events but also because the grid was neither designed nor equipped for distributed energy. These outages are proportionately increasing the need for utilities’ desire to know what’s happening on their lines. They want the ability to react to grid conditions and reliably supply power to their customers at an efficient cost. Next, there are demand challenges. The supply side of the equation coupled with the advent and proliferation of distributed energy resources in the electrical segment is creating a major dynamic for utility grids. Appliances, lighting, HVAC systems – essentially everything that we touch day in and day out as consumers of energy - are becoming more and more efficient. This is creating stagnant to reduced demand for these resources. Utilities are faced with revenue streams getting smaller, which bear the question: how do you keep as many of the customers as you have today in the future? The answer is by being the most responsive, reliable supplier for your consumers. Although products have become more efficient, the world is also more dependent upon power. “I’m sitting here today, working from home, making a living on a laptop computer. If I lose power, that’s a major problem for me today. 15, 20 years ago, that was an inconvenience, but I could get through it. Today, without power, within six or eight hour battery life on my laptop, I’m out of work. I can’t work. So that’s a tremendously important thing. “ – Greg Bodenhamer, Sr. VP of Global Sales IS THIS RELATIVE TO JUST ELECTRIC UTILITY, OR IS WATER AND GAS EXPERIENCING SIMILAR CHALLENGES? Water utilities have similar issues to that of electrical – just pipes instead of wires. There’s also a lot of aging infrastructure, especially in the Northeast region of the U.S.

Recently, we sat down with Kumi to get her perspective on the current and future state of the industry and how her product lines support the transformation. WHAT DOES “GRID MODERNIZATION” MEAN TO YOU, AND HOW DO SMART GRID SOLUTIONS PLAY INTO THAT? For over 100 years, the traditional power grid has been based off of large, centralized power plants where a very- stable supply was reacting to changes in demand. But that grid is changing. As distributed generation and renewables come online, it creates a non-stable, fluctuating supply that can be influenced by situations, such as weather, with limited control for the utility operators. Grids were originally designed for electricity that would flow in one direction. All of these distributed energy resources, which can be non-linear in operation, create another set of concerns in terms of power quality and the impacts to the existing grid technologies. Therefore, utility operators need to understand what is happening on the grid. Utilizing and implementing smart infrastructure allows operators to know what’s happening on the grid and, more importantly, react to it. At Aclara, we provide solutions that actually help utilities modernize their distribution grids, and by joining Hubbell, we could expand these solutions into other markets, such as transmission. WHAT TRENDS AND CHALLENGES IS THE ELECTRIC INDUSTRY FACING? First, let’s look at supply challenges. The rate at which distributed energy is entering the grid is quickly increasing due to changing economics relating to renewables and battery storage. Over the last decade, costs for wind and solar have seen double digit reductions in cost. This economic driver is leading to distributed generation taking over traditional generation methods. In fact, in 2019, most of the resources coming online

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