'As easy as ordering a pizza': How National Grid is building digital competency
It's about more than just hiring prompt engineers
With the energy market in a period of massive change, innovation is necessary to thrive.
Energy used to be a fairly one-directional system: suppliers generated it and consumers...consumed it.
The rise of renewables, allowing consumers to become generators, has changed the makeup of both the energy market and the grid that carries it.
"You couldn't really join at a more exciting or ambitious time of shifting into the energy sector," says National Grid CIO Sarah Milton-Hunt. "We're at a period where we couldn't need more innovation."
Transformation is often driven by "unexpected connections"; and having worked across sectors and industries before joining National Grid in 2021, Sarah speaks from experience.
"I think there is a benefit of [bringing] a commercial lens and possibly some commercial thinking to a regulated landscape, at a time when I think we need to be very clear about the value of what we're doing to the consumer at the end of this."
"This" is readying the Grid for the net zero transition and a more secure energy future fed by homegrown power, known as the Great Grid Upgrade.
From mechanical to digital
2023 marked 70 years of the Supergrid. As with any legacy project, updates are important to stay on top of changing demand and technology.
"Fundamentally, we've benefited from the innovation of those generations prior to us... and with the investment that's due to meet Net Zero we are in need of significant innovation. That includes the digitisation of what was an electro-mechanical system."
As Sarah is bringing lessons from the private sector, so different departments inside National Grid are learning from each other: chiefly, operational and information technology (OT and IT).
"An example would be protection and control... As we digitise that we can bring concepts of clustering from IT, which brings it to being more white label, commodity-type hardware, and the use of the cloud to still get the same response times and criticality...
"[Also] there is a bundle of stuff that we can learn from the OT landscape, particularly around reliability and resilience, that's inherent in everything we do in that landscape. It's how do you find the best of both?"
Future-proofing
Digitisation isn't the only transformation going on at National Grid; the electricity system itself is undergoing a "fundamental change."
"It used to be you had generation and demand and it was a fairly direct, one-direction type landscape. As we move into renewables and more of a prosumer rather than a consumer model, you've got a more volatile environment to manage - it's a lot less predictable."
The OT/IT convergence is making it easier to handle the transition, with more data and insights driving decision-making.
"We need to saturate ourselves with more data points and more insights of the live operation of the network," says Sarah. "It's not just about the means of getting to Net Zero, it's how we will operate in that landscape."
Future operations are going to demand different capabilities, talents and skill sets, and Sarah says National Grid will need "the right sort of engineers to ask the right questions." She expects a shift in what the organisation will need to operate effectively in a digital landscape.
Beyond bolt-on
Digital success is more than just hiring some new prompt engineers. It means IT has to go beyond being a separate department bolted onto the side; it's about "building out digital competency and capability across the whole company."
"Doing work and interacting with our systems and products from an internal perspective should be just as easy as ordering a pizza," says Sarah.
She's achieved that partly by building "the right kinds of apps," but also by looking beyond her own department, to build out digital capabilities across National Grid's business units and delivery vehicles.
"It's very much about how we have built the whole organisation's digital competence and shifted that model, versus us building this big digital stick on the side lines to beat the organisation.
"We've not done that. Instead, we're building to become a digital company."
Seeing as the Grid literally powers our industry, we wish Sarah and her team the best of luck.
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