Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Rayford Smith: Utilities naturally prefer acting like low-innovation railroads

Rayford Smith · With Great Power: What other industries can teach utilities about innovation · Aug 4, 2023 · at 18:51

AES Chief Utility Innovation Officer Rayford Smith compares the strategic crossroads facing electric utilities to choosing between a traditional railroad monopoly and an innovative telecom ecosystem.

0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And I think that utilities, like, their natural inclination is to be the railroad because that's the safe and it's the consistent thing that they've always done, and it's explainable to regulators, it's explainable to shareholders, to Wall Street, like, that, that's the easy route.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Rayford Smith

Opinion
Rayford Smith: Utilities should target one-month grid interconnections, not 18 months
“I've heard people say there's no way to get things on the grid faster than that, 12 to 18 months. I think fundamentally like that, then we still have a problem. Like we should be shooting for three months. We should be shooting for one month.”
Rayford Smith Aug 4, 2023 ▶ 25:37 With Great Power: What other industries can teach utilities about innovation
Opinion
Rayford Smith: 24/7 carbon-free energy is vastly harder than 100% renewables
“This is a fundamental sea change in how we do it, and it's considerably harder than what we had been accomplished up to that date.”
Rayford Smith Aug 4, 2023 ▶ 2:42 With Great Power: What other industries can teach utilities about innovation
Insight
Rayford Smith: AI's lack of explainability hinders regulatory approval in utilities
“One of the areas that's challenging is the explainability of it. When you're training these models, you're trying to get them to do what they do, and then they go make decisions. It's really hard to kind of backtrace, like, why did you make decision X versus w…”
Rayford Smith Aug 4, 2023 ▶ 7:57 With Great Power: What other industries can teach utilities about innovation
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rayford Smith: Utilities won't replace Newton-Raphson power flow models with AI soon
“The promise is there and we'll absolutely get there. But there's just some significant challenges technology-wise to make sure that, you know, no, you're not going to throw out your Newton-Raphson power flow model tomorrow because we've got this cool AI. Like,…”
Rayford Smith Aug 4, 2023 ▶ 9:10 With Great Power: What other industries can teach utilities about innovation
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rayford Smith Predicts Power Grids Will Shift Optimization Algorithms to the Edge
“And I think what you're going to start to see is you're going to start to see those technologies show up at the edge. You're going to start to see a much more intelligent, interactive ecosystem along the lines of IOT. And I think ultimately what that looks lik…”
Rayford Smith Aug 4, 2023 ▶ 10:38 With Great Power: What other industries can teach utilities about innovation
Disclosure
Smith: Google dynamically shifted computing loads based on grid constraints and carbon
“When I was at Google, one of the things we did was we created the ability to basically forecast forward power prices grid constraints, carbon content and then dynamically move our load around to take advantage of that. So if there was a storm and there was goi…”
Rayford Smith Aug 4, 2023 ▶ 13:58 With Great Power: What other industries can teach utilities about innovation
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.