The U.S. military generally has learned from the old adage that you shouldn’t plan for the last war, the next one will be very different. The military forces the U.S. fields today, while under-funded and much too small for the demands being placed on them, generally go into battle with the most advanced technologies and equipment available and plans to take the fight to the enemy in new and different ways he hadn’t anticipated. That’s the formula for winning, despite the under-funding, under-manning and maddening political ineptness that gets us into those wars and then tries to pull the rug out from under our forces once we’re there. 

 

I know, I served in the First Gulf War during a career in the U.S. Army Reserve. Of the Second Gulf War, I’ll just say to those politicians who want to get out now, before the job is done, that if you don’t take the fight to the enemy, the enemy definitely will bring it to you—see the Twin Towers, er, uh, where they used to be.

 

The purpose of this blog isn’t to fight the Second Gulf War, but to point out that a lot of people in the utility industry—particularly in the vendor community (not all, but too many)—are still planning for the last war. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had occasion to read a lot of material and talk with a lot of vendors who serve the industry. Without naming names, some of the less-optimistic things I have heard or read include:

 

·  We’re in the AMI business, why should we be interested in Intelligent Utility Enterprises or Smart Grids. That’s not our business.

·  We’re in the Smart Grid business, but there’s no reason for real-time data to flow outside the operations/engineering departments, that’s dangerous and they wouldn’t understand it anyway.

·  There has never been a greater need for utility providers to employ customer segmentation in order to improve the results of their marketing communication efforts.

 

 

 

 

·  AMI is morphing from a meter-reading technology to one of the major gateways to the home. If it isn’t integrated with everything else, it’s a waste of time and a great deal of money. AMI vendors who don’t look at the broader picture and make themselves amenable to working within that broader framework will be left in the dust. They at least need to be in communication with others, vendors and utilities, already looking to the future.

·  SCADA/DA vendors who don’t understand that the grid is a subset of the utility and must provide real-time information to the enterprise, where ultimate decision-making must take place are still working in the last century.

·  People who talk about customer segmentation for marketing purposes apparently missed the collapse of deregulation/competition in this country and the fact that utilities aren’t trying to sell packaged products and services. They’re worried about how they’re going to meet skyrocketing demand with constrained supply and what to do when they have to start rationing usage through demand-management. Yes, they need to know much more about their customers—like which ones they can reduce voltage to without disrupting lives—but not to sell them widgets.

·  Back-office vendors who don’t realize utilities are going to have to have systems that can cope with floods of real-time data and convert it into information to make time-critical decisions on a myriad of variables, are still thinking about rate-payers billed once a month.

·  Anyone who wants to enter the U.S. market with an outsourced CIS has been blind and deaf since the turn of the century—at least since 2001.

 

Normally technology vendors—God love ‘em—are ahead of utilities in bringing foresight and advanced solutions to the utility market. We couldn’t get along without them. But utilities, facing a serious crunch in supply over the next 10 years—particularly if the Global Warming propaganda machine shuts down coal generation, as it appears it will—have seen the handwriting on the wall. They know that getting much smarter, the Intelligent Utility Enterprise, and much more automated, the Smart Grid to the home, are the only options left to them. CIOs—the technology gurus for utilities, with a seat in the boardroom—are going to be leading this fight. Vendors need to get on the same page, or at least into the same book. 

The last utility war was won—utilities moved from manual operations to automation— but the one over the next 10 years looks very iffy. You can’t sell last decade’s solutions to utility executives who are very worried about the next decade and who you don't even want to talk to.  You won’t survive as a vendor and you won’t be serving the industry.  Many vendors are already in the fight, but from the conversations I’ve had of late, quite a few aren’t.

Oh, by the way, the war in the Gulf looks winnable too, frim a military perspective, if we don't surrender first.  If we do, then all bets are off because we'll be fighting--and probably losing--it over here.  Security vendors will be in very high demand and had better plan to defend everything a utility has.  I'm glad I'm retired from the Army, though I wouldn't take anything for the experiences of my part-time military career.  But I do worry about the nation and the industry my 17-year-old son is going to co-inherit.