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GridBeyond is a global leader in providing intelligent energy technology solutions for industrial, commercial, institutional, and utility partners. Whether it is for renewables, battery storage, or flexible industrial processes, their platform uses automation and AI to give its customer the ability to trade and optimize the position of their assets in the energy markets in real-time. GridBeyond helps in improving their bottom line whilst facilitating the transition to net-zero.
Brian Gahan is the CIO of GridBeyond. He started his career at HP where he played a variety of technical roles initially in product development and factory automation for the Inkjet division. He later became the global head of IT for the Graphics and 3D services business, where Brian was more focused on strategy development, customer experience, and delivery of customer-facing services. Brian also spent a few years in the regulated energy sector, implementing a cloud migration and digital transformation program as head of IT at Flogas (a DCC company) before joining GridBeyond as CIO last year. His role in the company is heavily focused on the development of their energy trading and optimization platform, and his team has already delivered an initial pilot release earlier this year.
Brian says that spending the early part of his career in a major multinational technology company was a great way to get the fundamentals of leading-edge technological design and delivery. He states that HP was ahead of the curve and he and his team were completing digital transformation and cloud migrations well before they became mainstream. Brian also had the opportunity to work with some amazing leaders throughout his career, which taught him that the real value of an organization is in its people and that the way to grow value and create a high-performance workplace is to invest in talent development, diversity, and culture.
Brian believes that the CIO's core responsibility is to lead IT in advancing the business strategy. He adds that strong commercial orientation helps to ensure technology investments yield the appropriate organizational benefits."The biggest driver of long-term value in business is people capabilities" says Brian. He trusts the concept of recognizing, acquiring, developing, and retaining the best talent which when combined with a positive culture and collaborative working environment would result in higher performance and better business outcomes.
Brian asserts that the role of the CIO is to structure the IT organization effectively, and hence he believes that a CIO must be keen on building strategic supplier partnerships that ensure connectivity to the latest technology developments.
Brian mentions that the capability of identifying and delivering the core differentiators which drive success for energy market stakeholders are vital catalysts of product adoption. To successfully achieve this, one needs to be able to bring the business and IT teams together so that the strong domain knowledge can be combined with the leading-edge technology to deliver a differentiated offering that meets the customer needs.
Brian states the ability to match supply and demand has become the holy grail of successfully migrating to renewables. He mentions a sample analysis of the Irish grid over a seven-day period in November 2021 where the demand on the grid fluctuated between 3.2 GW and 6.6 GW, whilst for the same period the wind availability fluctuated between 1% and 75% (0.064 GW and 2.7 GW) of that demand. The traditional fail-safe approach has largely been to have supply match demand by curtailing wind and hydro when there's excess and bringing on gas power stations that emit 350 to 400 tons of carbon per GWH when there's a deficit. Brian points out a more sustainable solution is matching the supply with better demand-side flexibility and storage – solutions to which are central to GridBeyond's strategy.
Brian says that three concurrent technology trends are facilitating the development of technology solutions to help society achieve the ambitious carbon reduction targets.
1. Developments in native cloud services and scalable cloud compute power are simplifying product development, and supplying the capabilities to build AI solutions that adjust for supply and demand changes in real-time.
Brian says that technology product development nowadays has evolved much like the development of an F1 car has. The growth in the availability of cloud services has meant that many of the building blocks for a product are often readily available either as cloud-native services or configurable PaaS or SaaS solutions. The challenge for the platform architect, therefore, becomes more of selection and integration of the right components, whilst simultaneously keeping the internal core talent focused on going deep on building the 5-10% secret sauce where it gives a competitive edge.
"This has leveled the playing field for smaller companies who can create enterprise-grade products and services that can dynamically scale to match the degree of market success," states Brian.
2. IOT evolution means the previously dark energy assets in everybody's homes, vehicles, and businesses are becoming SMARTER and more connected.
Brian claims that IoT capabilities provide connectivity to SMART devices such as EV's and heating and cooling systems, commercial processes, generation assets, etc. so that more accurate data can be collected and more control appliedover when these assets contribute to or pull from the grid. He adds that GridBeyond's market-leading IoT platform can integrate with and automate the control of the commercial load, generation and battery storage assets to respond to shifts in supply or demand.
3. Advances in the development and maturity of data science tools mean that its now possible to better forecast load, generation and storage, and transition to proactive demand response.
The data science technology ecosystem in Python and R has led to rapid experimentation and faster innovation and Brian feels that open source and community-based approaches encourage sharing and collaborative development, which allows R&D results to spread from experiments to actual data products sometimes in a matter of weeks rather than years.
Lastly, Brian credits certainly deep learning approaches that have leveraged scalable cloud compute power to become highly refined by using thousands of hidden layers. "This allows deep learning networks to capture complex mappings, and do time series forecasting and classification which are key to effective energy optimization solutions," adds Brian.
"In tech, the early career is all about learning new technologies and choosing where to specialize," reveals Brian. He kick-started his journey in robotics and automation but soon he gravitated more towards data and business intelligence. According to Brian, technologies were a little different back then but the fundamentals of designing to business needs and transforming data into knowledge haven't changed. "Every opportunity certainly brings new challenges, and technology is ever-changing so in IT as in most professions it's all about lifelong learning," adds Brian.
Brian expresses that as IT is becoming more and more of a team sport, it equally requires the leaders to become much more team and business-centric than they previously were. He illustrates the example of the data science capability, which is a collection of several statistical, technological, and business skill sets distributed among many individuals rather than a single role. To make all these capabilities work effectively together requires the right type of talent and working environment. "While hiring technology professionals, collaboration and team working skills are as critical to high performance as technical proficiencies," remarks Brian.
Brian discusses the perception that data centers are causing problems for the grid for the fact they create a significant additional load, but he argues they can be a big part of the solution. The geographical redundancy inherent in data center design means that at critical times they can easily shift their compute load to a different region whilst in parallel allowing their on-site generation to export to the grid.
Brian emphasizes that society needs data centers as they are the engine of the knowledge economy and run the technology that balances the grid. "When you consider these factors in the round, co-locating data centers in regions where there is a large renewable supply is a pretty progressive move" adds Brian.
As evidenced by COP26, there are major changes in the public agenda and political landscape afoot claims Brian. Climate change is happening now and there is a major shift to investment in renewable and smart grid technologies, storage, and flexibility. While talking in the same context, Brian mentions that the GridBeyond trading and optimization platform for generation assets and commercial batteries was released earlier this year in UK and Ireland and is gaining a lot of traction in the market. "We also have a slimmed-down version running in Texas and we are going live with a major customer in Japan in Q1. Over the next 12 to 18 months, we will further develop the feature set, scalability, and learning capabilities of the product whilst expanding to all asset types and target markets including behind-the-meter microgrids," he highlights.
Brian further adds that the market to date has been mainly focused on the large infrastructure owners and he feels that technology developments and regulatory changes mean that consumers will soon be starting to play an increasing role in contributing to the transition.
Consumers and businesses will have the systems to choose to charge their EV's at times that are likely to provide financial and environmental benefits. "In time, significant deployment of EV's and 'vehicle to grid' technology with the right incentives will mean EV's exporting power to balance the grid at peak times instead of gas power stations. This approach allows environmentally conscientious consumers to become net contributors to reducing the carbon footprint of the grid," states Brian.
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