The pride that utilities take in keeping the lights on is as deep as it is pervasive, providing individuals and entire organizations with a sense of pride that’s palpable. The general public’s assumption that power will instantly appear at the flip of a switch is a badge of honor carried across the entire energy sector, compelling few to ever think about the complex infrastructure working behind the scenes.
And for a long time, that’s exactly how most utilities preferred it.
However, soaring energy demand, grid reliability pressures, and rising costs are disrupting that light switch experience. Additionally, we’re seeing the downside of operating behind the scenes, with pushback around data centers and affordability challenges that stem from people not knowing the full story about things rate cases and policy decisions.
Better conveying the realities and stakes of today’s energy transition is the core mission behind OATI’s Powering Independence campaign on National Geographic. By showcasing how modern technology empowers local communities to take control of their energy future and elevating concepts energy sovereignty, the initiative is positively changing the expectations and understanding people have when flipping on that light switch.
What’s the best way to convey the actual stakes and complexity behind that instant delivery of power to the general public? What can the broader energy sector learn from this initiative, and how can other stakeholders replicate its success? Factor This sat down with OATI CEO Dr. Sasan Mokhtari to explore the project’s impact and what it reveals about the future of energy storytelling.
Jeremiah Karpowicz: Very few people in the energy sector are unfamiliar with OATI, but your Powering Independence campaign highlighted the organization as “a hidden giant, quietly addressing the grid’s greatest challenges.” Can you talk about the importance of stepping out from behind the scenes to take on a more visible role with the general public?
Dr. Sasan Mokhtari: “Hidden giant” is a fair description, and for most of our thirty years we were comfortable with it. We’re a technical group of power systems engineers who have historically focused on building solutions for the energy industry, not branding. Today, data from 99 percent of North American utilities passes through our data centers, and we’ve grown more comfortable in recent years with sharing our story and impact more broadly.
Why is it important for consumers to get a better grasp of the scale and complexity required to keep the grid balanced every second? How could better consumer awareness tangibly impact the decisions that utilities are making in the short and long term?
Electricity is the only product people buy that has to be manufactured and delivered in the instant they use it. Supply and demand must match every second, across a continent, continuously. Most people have never been told that.
That gap matters, and when customers understand that balance is a continuous act, flexibility stops sounding a cost and starts sounding an opportunity. A utility with an informed customer base can plan around demand-side resources with confidence. A utility without one has to assume every customer will use everything at once, and build for that. One of those paths is far more expensive than the other, and the customer pays for it either way.
The NatGeo article gives us a quick look at OATI Headquarters, but we were able totake a tour of the facility last year to see your microgrid operation firsthand. Why is it important to explain the intricacies of operational trade-offs ramping up local generation and selling excess power to the grid to a non-technical audience?
Our headquarters runs on a microgrid — generation, storage, and controls, managed by the same software we provide to utilities. On a given afternoon, we may produce more than we consume and put the surplus back onto the grid. Other times we pull from it. That decision is made continuously, based on price, on weather, and on what the system needs.
For us, a microgrid is not so much about trade-offs and more about flexibility and resilience—when you need it most. We wanted to go to market with a microgrid solution that we know works in practice and show that microgrids have far more use cases than most people, even in our industry, understand.
This sort of communication is clearly a focus for OATI, which we further saw when former Factor This editor John Engeljoined Bloomberg Businessweek Daily to discuss how utilities across the country are using your smart grid technology to maintain reliability. How are efforts these impacting what can otherwise be negative assumptions by entire communities about data centers?
The assumption is that a data center arrives, consumes an enormous amount of power, and everyone else absorbs the cost. Sometimes that has been true, but it doesn’t have to be.
A large load that can be curtailed, shifted, or backed by its own generation becomes a valuable grid resource. Flexible interconnection lets a data center connect years faster in exchange for giving something back during the hours the grid is tight. That’s a real trade, and it’s happening now at a small scale.
Engel called out the nuances that can be associated with this topic, as he noted that meeting NYC’s energy demand requires a much different approach than supplying a suburban footprint. How can educating consumers about these sorts of nuances improve the conversations utilities need to have with their customers around regional infrastructure investments?
New York and a suburban service territory are not the same engineering problem. Dense urban systems are underground, networked, and have almost no room to add anything, while a suburban footprint has overhead lines, land, and space for distributed resources. The physics are identical, but the economics and the available options are not.
When a utility can explain why this substation, in this neighborhood, is the binding constraint — and what the alternatives were and what they’d cost — the conversation builds trust. The modern power grid is incredibly complex, but it’s imperative that we take the time to explain to consumers how utilities are deploying advanced technologies to improve their way of living.
Do you think giving the public a better sense of these operational realities will help counter negative headlines around affordability, whichremains a top-of-mind issue across the sector?
Partly, and I want to be careful here, because affordability is not a perception problem. Bills are rising in a number of regions. What better awareness can do is change the question from “why is my bill higher” to “what are we getting for it, and was there a cheaper way?”
Five-year peak demand forecasts published by utilities jumped from 38 gigawatts to 128 gigawatts in a single year. That demand is real, and it has to be served.
The honest argument is that serving it by getting more out of what we already own — flexibility, dynamic ratings, non-wires alternatives — is materially cheaper than building everything new.
Could that better awareness even impact how these issues are reported on? As seen in headlines this that call out the upfront costs of constructing new transmission lines rather than the avoided outage costs or grid-balancing benefits, how can clearer communication from utilities and their partners help shift media narratives toward long-term grid value?
The headline number is easy to report because it’s one figure with a dollar sign in front of it. New transmission runs roughly a million dollars a mile, and several times that at the highest voltages. What’s missing is the comparison.
A new interstate line takes four to eleven years just to permit, and ten to twelve years from concept to energization. Dynamic line ratings can unlock 20 to 40 percent more capacity on lines a utility already owns, in months. I think our industry tends to fall short on providing valuable context to external stakeholders – the press and public included. If we published avoided-outage and avoided-build costs with the rigor we publish capital budgets, the coverage would change.
Werecently reported on survey data that showed 75% of consumers are confident in engineers’ ability to develop solutions to future energy challenges. Even more striking was the finding that nearly 100% of respondents believe it’s essential for engineers to educate the public on these issues. How do those statistics align with OATI’s recent outreach initiatives?
Those figures underscore why we participated in the NatGeo documentary series in the first place. Consumers are capable of understanding complex topics when armed with the right information, and the messenger matters. Every one of our utility and tribal customers is working daily to improve their communities, but that mission often gets lost in various debates. We’ve taken the same approach on business television and in tribal press. The credibility lives in the technical detail.
Put the people who build the systems in front of the public, let them speak plainly, and trust that the audience is smarter than we’ve been assuming.
How do you see this effort to communicate and provide better transparency changing the dynamic between utilities, regulators, and local communities when proposing new grid modernization projects?
Today, a modernization proposal usually becomes public at the moment it needs approval. So the first thing a community learns about a project is that the decision has already been made. Predictably, they push back. If a community understands the constraint before there’s a proposal, the proposal arrives as an answer to a d problem.
What’s the single most important message you want utility project teams and executive leaders to hear when it comes to why they need to proactively advocate for grid modernization, which can be geared toward their current customers, but should also be applicable to the broader public?
Advocate before you need approval. If the first time your customers hear about grid modernization is when it shows up on their bill, you’ve already lost the argument.
We keep pushing the message that the grid isn’t out of capacity; it’s out of coordination. We can serve an enormous amount of new demand with infrastructure we already own, if we operate it intelligently. That’s a good story!
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Renewableenergyworld.com
