In IBM's October PowerSession, leaders from PG&E, IBM and National Grid agreed on where resilience spending should start: with the meters, sensors and people already in place.
Ask a utility panel about resilience and you'd expect a tour of new hardware. The panel kept steering somewhere cheaper.Â
Sandeep Ganesh, a partner who leads IBM's grid modernization and operations practice and a former PG&E distribution operations manager, put it as a single question for any utility: "What are you doing with what you already have?"
Utilities are about to spend big, and every dollar has to earn its keep
Ganesh framed the stakes. U.S. utilities have pledged roughly $1.5 trillion to modernize the grid over the next five to seven years, driven by data centers, AI and electrification, after about 30 years of nearly flat demand. He said roughly 60% to 70% of that money goes to new construction. The other 30% to 35% goes to getting more out of the system utilities already run.
The tension is affordability. Regulators are worried about rates, and so are utilities. The ones doing this well, Ganesh said, show regulators what the last round of investment delivered before asking for the next one.
The best new sensor might already be on the side of the house
Andy Abranches, from PG&E, offered the session's clearest example. PG&E rolled out its first-generation smart meters in 2008 and 2009, mostly to read usage. Today it mines data from 5.5 million of them to find the signal patterns that come before an equipment failure.
That chain matters in California. "A failure then becomes a fault, a fault becomes an outage, and potentially an outage could become an ignition," he said. The next generation of meters will go from a reading once an hour "to 32,000 readings a second," which turns every meter into a much sharper view of the primary system.
Co-benefits make the case, if someone counts them
An investment can carry a "resilience" label and still pay off on a clear Tuesday. Ganesh pointed to sensors that report when a pole is leaning. They were installed for one purpose, but they also flag maintenance work and tell dispatchers where to send a crew.
Abranches added a benefit that rarely makes the slide deck: safety. A troubleman who knows where the fault is spends less time driving the line looking for it. PG&E is quantifying benefits like these for regulators, he said, but carefully: "We don't want to over-promise and under-deliver."
Daniel Stevens, a certified emergency manager who has worked at FEMA, Southern California Edison and National Grid, flagged the timing problem. Rate cases run three to five years, while hardening programs pay off over decades. At National Grid, he said, climate resilience plans laid out the longer arc so each rate case could show where it fit. The New York plan is public.
Automation helps, except when it doesn't
Fault location, isolation and service restoration (FLISR) schemes, which pinpoint a fault and automatically re-energize the line on either side of it, can turn a thousand-customer outage into a hundred-customer one. During fire season, though, PG&E turns automatic reclosing off. Re-energizing into a line that's still damaged can start a fire. As Andy put it, new tools sometimes mean "two steps forward, one step back."
The front line is the whole workforce
Stevens made the case that security belongs to everyone, the same way safety does. The first person to notice a threat might be a control room operator, someone in the field who notices a stranger taking pictures or a call center agent who spots a pattern in complaints. "The front line is really the whole workforce," he said.
That theme carried into the closing round. Chris Behme, a strategy leader in IBM's North American utility practice, said the investment he'd prioritize is people who can adapt as fast as the technology changes. Stevens said leaders should watch how they react when someone raises a concern, because brushing off concerns teaches people to stop raising them.Â
Andy's advice for utilities facing more extreme weather was to build out a denser weather station network. "It's not a question of climate change. We're dealing with a changed climate," he said.
Watch the full session
The panel also covered edge computing, quantum computing, dynamic line rating and how to tie weather forecasts to cost recovery. Watch the full PowerSession on demand.