Tips & News - Winter- 2019

Economics are changing for the utility because they’re helping the customer save energy. That means their revenues may not necessarily be going up. So they need to provide additional services to make up for that lost revenue. There are utilities who are running these service programs as pilots now. Aclara has some really neat technologies around desegregation of energy in the home. The other piece that’s coming online is the ability to connect all those devices and help you manage your energy within your home. Hubbell offers solutions for that through their iDevices product line. HUBBELL & ACLARA: UTILITY PARTNER OF THE FUTURE Putting our communications modules in Hubbell products is a great opportunity for Aclara and Hubbell to come together to provide advanced solutions to our customers. Both Aclara and Hubbell have a lot of solutions that help utilities move towards the future, and a key one is retrieving information back from smart devices and providing insights to the utility that help them manage the grid very effectively. Not just measuring effectivity, it’s also controlling the grid based on the information and the insights that utilities get back. A major impact to come from the joining of Aclara and Hubbell is not just being a B2B company with the expectation that we are going to supply the consumer, but taking the consumer experience itself in consideration of investment and capital design. Evaluating trends from an individual consumer perspective will help utilities stay relevant, and with that, Hubbell and Aclara can continue to stay relevant as well. To further leverage the strengths and capabilities of Aclara and HPS, Kumi Premathilake is now leading a combined team that focuses on AMI technology and utility automation devices.

communicating network are getting better every day, revenue-strapped utilities still struggle to invest the upfront Capital to reap benefits from an AMI system. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE NEXT BIG WAVE? The next big wave is really the changing renewable mix. Utilities were already making plans to change their supply mix 5, 10 years ago. So that trend is not going to change, and as a result, they have to plan to introduce renewables into their grid. The other piece is end-to-end solutions. There are going to be a lot of players because not one solutions provider can provide everything to the utilities. So, partners such as ourselves have to be able to integrate with a lot of products and solutions within that ecosystem. Aclara, with Hubbell, can provide an interim solution in that ecosystem. Another industry wave will be utilities getting closer or better connected to their end customers. Energy consumers are much more active than they used to be. Previously, they’d get a power bill, know what their energy usage is, and that they’re paying for that energy usage. Now when they get a bill, they see how efficient they are compared to their neighbors. Even more than that, some consumers want to know where the supply is coming from because they’re concerned about the environment. Utilities have to figure out how to use the data (that comes from the automation they’ve installed) to better engage with their consumers, so that they don’t run the risk of losing them to distributed energy.

14 | HUBBELL POWER SYSTEMS