Powering the Technology Generation

Today, technology is playing a pivotal role in the utility industry. David Mohler, CTO of power giant Duke Energy talks to Business Management about how technology is driving energy management into a new age.

The utility industry is in a state of transition. Society’s desire for cleaner, greener energy is driving a transformation for traditional power suppliers, both in terms of their operations and their product. In order to enable that change, technology has played a greater role in energy distribution in recent years than it ever has before. “The electric utility industry is essentially a 100 year old technology business,” explains CTO of utility giant Duke Energy, David Mohler, which is ironic considering that in 2006, when Mohler first took up the role as CTO he was one of the first c-level technology executives in the industry.

Indeed, the increasing demands on the utilities industry to create innovative and efficient low-carbon energy strategies has made the CTO an integral role to the modern utilities company operating in today's market. Despite the hitherto limited duration of his role, Mohler has already witnessed a number of changes, and expects a lot more to come. "As time continues to roll forward the pace of technological change continues to accelerate," he says, "but we are now at a point where we have to make some true advances in the technology we deploy. We're going to see some truly significant changes, and what we've really had to do recently is broaden our view, so that now we look at what those truly transformational changes could be."

In terms of his responsibilities as CTO, Mohler's role is fairly straightforward, taking charge of sourcing innovative advances in technology from research institutes, filtering through those technologies to ascertain which make commercial sense for Duke Energy, and integrating them into the business model. He reveals that implementing the transformational technologies that are needed to push to company forward is not always easy, and one of the biggest challenges of his job is to get all personnel on board with a change. "The more transformational the technology is, the more difficult it is [to implement] because if you are going to fundamentally change the way you do something, that's usually a big pill for an organization to swallow."
Mohler's solution to tackle this problem is to maintain a constant flow of communication across the company. "We've attempted to set up a kind of internal governance and communications structure so that on a periodic basis, if there's something really major we're doing, we put together a group from across our company and we include those people in our decision process."

He explains how he also conducts quarterly conversations with subject matter experts as standard, to discuss what his division has achieved in technology development, what the plans are for the imminent future and get an assessment from other sectors of the business about what is working for them and what is not. This process can raise its own challenges, Mohler says, as one practice that may be successful for one division may not be what is really needed to take technology and performance to the next level across the whole business.

Still, Mohler recognizes that continued internal communication is the most effective way to move the company forward, and he tries to reflect this in his management style. "The leadership style I aspire to," he explains, "is one where we have continuing conversations that are productive and that are robust and that help everybody, including me, really get their heads around all the issues that we confront as we try to develop new technologies."

This style of leadership is clearly effective. As well as being one of the country's leading utility providers, Duke Energy is something of a pioneer in the low-carbon energy sector. The firm has been working for a number of years now on various strategies to advance in this market, investing a considerable amount of research time and resources into energy efficiency schemes based largely around the wide-scale use of smart grid technology. This, Mohler explains, is all part of the company vision to make the communities Duke serves the most energy efficient in the world. He is modest about the company's leading position, and points out that Duke's competitors are never far behind. Still, he concedes, "I'd say we're making giant steps in developing advanced forms of energy management."

The smart grid is an integral feature of Duke Energy's technological development. As a piece of technology it is revolutionizing the utilities industry, with specialists likening it to the Internet in terms of its potential for energy distribution. Mohler explains that one of his primary objectives is to ensure the grid itself will be capable of sustaining the technological advancements that will emerge in the future. "I don't think any of us knows what the grid is actually going to be capable of in ten years," he explains. "We want to build our smart grid out so that it can incorporate that continuing technology development, even in areas that will surprise us in the future. Where we differ a lot from our peers is we did not approach the smart grid as a metering exercise. We saw it as one device in a network of devices and we really focused on the network rather than any single device."

Mohler points out that while technology innovation is an integral part of the business strategy, operating in the utility industry presents a very particular challenge. "People do not want their lights to go out," he explains. "There is and there needs to continue to be a real focus on reliability. We are risk averse when we look at things that could impact reliability negatively." In addition, Mohler explains, sometimes knowing when to hold back on developing new technologies can be just as efficient, and he is not one ignore the advances already available. "We don't want to reinvent the wheel," he says, explaining how Internet Protocol is a perfectly efficient network communication device. "In my mind, and I've been pretty vocal about this in my industry, there is no need for us to go out and invent a new network protocol for the utility industry. Let's use what's out there and what's already got a lot of years of development behind it.

"Frankly the utility industry has been kind of parochial in its history and every utility wants to invent its own kind of thing, and I think we've got to move beyond that if we really want to have the optimum value for us going forward."