Gartner Report Confirms Grid Orchestration Software Helps Utility Industry Advance Towards a Clean Energy Grid

The utility industry is changing. 

We see it all around us as more and more utilities drive to support decarbonization and electrification, increasing complexity in the process. For example, it’s well known that renewables are growing in prevalence across the grid. Each new renewable becomes another endpoint, along with the challenge of intermittency. 

Then there’s the increasing electrification of transportation. Literally thousands of dollars in new investment are needed for every electric vehicle to accommodate new electrical needs for vehicle charging. And finally, there’s the increasing occurrence of severe weather events and cyberattacks, any of which could bring down the grid for an untold amount of time.

All of the above creates complexity – and as it increases, it runs the risk of overwhelming grid management systems.

That’s why orchestration software is the next frontier for the clean energy grid. Unlike legacy software approaches, orchestration software, like our new GridOS®, is scalable, cloud-ready and de-siloed. The de-siloed aspect of orchestration software is especially crucial, as many solutions are monolithic, or self-contained and unconnected with other applications. It's important for grid software to be able to sync together multiple applications designed for different portions of the grid; in other words, modularizing big software into usable functions. GridOS integrates energy data, network modeling, and AI-driven analytics across the grid to power composable applications that connect transmission and distribution lines to endpoints and back. 

Indeed, a recent paper by Gartner underscored the importance of orchestration software for utilities  transitioning to a clean energy grid. Specifically, the paper talks about the old way of doing business  (ego-centric) versus the new way of doing business (eco-centric). Orchestration software plays a key role in helping organizations transform into doing business the eco-centric way. Let’s take a look at both:

The Old Way : Ego-centric

Does this conjure up images of CEOs leading with their hearts, not their heads? Perhaps, but that’s not what this refers to. This is a term Gartner gave to the old way of doing business as a utility. Until relatively recently, utilities leveraged internal-focused business models that were focused on internal KPIs, like business-outcome-driven metrics (BODMs) and technology-outcome-driven metrics (TODMs). Examples include maintaining asset reliability and availability, reducing commodity risk, or reducing customer service provisioning costs. In other words, investments were focused on applications and technologies with an internal outcome – hence the term ego-centric. 

This approach may have been practical once upon a time, when utilities had total control over their own energy generation and delivery infrastructure – but things aren’t quite so simple anymore.

The New Way  Eco-centric

Clean energy transition is prevalent and well underway, adding extreme complexity to the grid. New actors are on the scene, including prosumers, commercial and industrial customers with on-premise renewable generation and storage looking to monetize externally, as well as independent energy producers. All these actors are external and must be orchestrated within the respective energy systems.

A business model focused on improving internal KPIs is no longer sufficient to succeed in this collaborative energy world. Utilities must adopt an external facing mindset and think about how to enable collaboration with all these external actors. Only then will they be able to create value via a collaborative network of external energy resources owned by customers and partners alike. This becomes what Gartner calls an ecosystem-centered, or eco-centric business model.

Grid orchestration software is the key to switching from an ego-centric model to an eco-centric model. Orchestration software, as the name suggests, orchestrates electrons across transmission, distribution, and the edge in an integrated manner. 

It also combines grid planning and operations with market solutions to seamlessly manage the grid from an operational and an economic perspective to ensure electrons are reaching consumers in a safe, reliable, and affordable manner and that utilities can unlock the economic value of distributed economic resources and renewables flexibly. In other words, orchestration software keeps grids operating and power flowing while operators switch to green energy sources (and to an eco-centric mindset) – and this importance is underscored fully by Gartner’s recent research paper. 

Investing in grid orchestration cannot wait. As the Gartner report states, utilities must “consider acquiring or building a digital platform business that will orchestrate diverse, flexible resources across external participants, such as virtual power plants, aggregators and customers.” At the rate renewables are penetrating the system, grid-threatening weather events are occurring, and electrification is spreading across the grid, the time is now to take the next step and invest in grid software. Only then can utilities switch to an eco-centric mindset and truly, fully modernize the grid.

If you are a utility seeking to better understand how your business model and the software empowering it can help with grid orchestration, download this Gartner report made available by GE Digital Grid Software.