Who is your energy transition digital superhero?

Which superhero best epitomises the power of digitalisation in the energy transition?

Quirky question, isn’t it? It was asked by Andrea Falciai, EMEA Utilities Lead at Accenture, to three industry leaders during Accenture’s International Utilities and Energy conference in Lisbon.

The trio were Ana Paula Marques of Portuguese utility EDP, Luke Jenner from Australian electricity distributor Essential Energy and Claudio Farina of Italian energy company Snam.

All three have worked to install a ‘digital core’ in their companies to ensure they are resilient and adaptable, so all three are aware of the power and potential of digitalisation.

So which superheroes from page and screen did they pick?

Shuri: ‘she finds creative solutions’

Marques chose Shuri, who appears in Marvel’s Black Panther comics and film (in which she’s played by Letitia Wright).

“She a technological genius: she’s smart, she’s innovative, and she symbolises the things that a digital core can bring to a company,” said Marques.

“She has a lot of problem-solving skills: she’s known for finding very creative solutions… just like how the digital core can help us tackle the very complex problems we have in the energy sector.

“She is also able to adapt very fast, just as the energy sector must do in the context of what we are living through today.”

And Marques added that “last but not least, she promotes empowerment, innovation and she strengthens her nation with her technological advancements – like a digital core strengthens a business.”

Lightning: ‘an energy transition analogy’

Jenner chose another female superhero: Lightning, who appears in DC Comics and is the daughter of Black Lightning.

“The reason I chose her is because I think she is a good analogy for the energy transition: she’s had a bit of a troubled past – when she was born, she didn’t have any superpowers, and when those powers started to emerge, she didn’t quite know how to control them.

“She had to be trained to know how to use and channel her powers. I think there’s a lot of analogies with the energy transition, where we are still trying to find our feet and we’ve got a long way to go.”

JARVIS: ‘tech is the superpower’

Farina, meanwhile, admitted that he had “cheated a bit” because he did not pick a person, but instead a technology:  JARVIS: the AI system that powers the armour of Iron Man.

“Technology may be the superpower – but we are the superheroes,” said Farina.  

He added that JARVIS had a further special resonance: it was the name Snam gave to the first digitalisation programme it worked on with Accenture in 2018.

The power of digitalisation was the focus of a report called Wired for Tomorrow which launched just ahead of Accenture’s Lisbon conference. In it, the company, in partnership with European trade association Eurelectric, assessed the digital maturity of Europe’s grid operators.

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With 40% of Europe’s grid now more than 40 years old, the report surveyed 30 European DSOs and concluded that digitalisation was a key enabler of breaking bottlenecks and future-proofing the grid – however, it depended on supportive regulation, a supply of skilled workers, and a focused mindset of the DSOs themselves.

I caught up with Accenture’s Andrea Falciai at the launch of the report in Athens, and asked what needs to lie at the heart of a strong digital core.

“Data,” he says. “Strong data governance, data security and data quality. Data governance – especially when you want to integrate OT and IT – must be very structured, otherwise the risk is that your data is not good enough for what you want to do.” 

However, he stressed that a digital transformation programme was “not a matter of technology: it’s a matter of maturity and business commitment. All DSOs are now realising that this is the only way to move forward.”

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He added that “digitalisation is not a solution, it is a tool – an enabler. The solution is the business commitment. Because without that, digital is useless. Adopting a technology for the sake of adopting a technology makes no sense.”

And he broke down the steps to implement digitalisation: “You must have a vision on how you want to move your company ahead, then identify use cases… and then you implement. And you pilot. And you scale it.

“And it could be that you fail because it was not what you needed… but then you move ahead on another use case. This is the way that things can really progress quickly. Because the key word is ‘speed’.”

That would be superhero speed, I guess.

Originally published on powerengineeringint.com