AThe power and utilities industry will meet this moment by leveraging a wide array of generation types, from nuclear to renewables. They will also drive the paradigm shift from centralized to distributed generation - distributed energy resources in the context of an adaptive and resilient power system architecture.

ATechnology plays a crucial role in enabling power and utility companies to provide a transformed customer experience, with rapidly advancing technologies enabling better interaction. The introduction of GenAI will further enhance ongoing customer–utility interaction. It will improve power system resiliency/self-healing characteristics enabled by technology-controlled distributed energy resources, monitor customer-controlled power generation (e.g., wind and solar) and storage (battery storage), and enable customers to select renewable generation suppliers (in Europe and in North America to a lesser extent). These are examples of how the customer experience has been evolving over the past 10 to 15 years and will evolve perhaps even faster into the future. 

AToday technology is integral to utility business processes including customer experience, procurement and supply chain management, power system asset management, construction, restoration and resiliency, NERC-CIP compliance, and more. Although cloud modernization began in a meaningful way in the 2020s, cloud transformation and modernization were relatively nascent during the Covid pandemic and are now “breaking out” across aspects of the industry.   Today, considerable utility IT infrastructure is headed toward cloud modernization while utility operational technology (OT) modernization is still a work in progress. Fundamentally, the latest generation of cloud platforms and applications are allowing utilities to create higher quality data across utility enterprises that affords them capabilities that heretofore were extremely difficult to achieve. In this decade, utilities are now able to measure what they need to manage whether it be their processes, employee performance, equipment performance, and more. These significant modernization trends will be crucial to helping utilities manage their current business while improving their ability to invest in demonstrable priorities for the future.