Inside NESO’s mission to build a digital-first energy system for GB

Carolina (00:02)
On the innovation side, keep pushing because that’s your job. You need to make people uncomfortable because if they’re not uncomfortable, if there’s no conflict, there’s no learning. The only way I’ve ever learned anything is by disagreeing with people. So you need to create that environment, but at the same time, recognise where you can do that versus where you cannot. So have the wisdom to approach the right people in the right way.

Adam Sroka (00:15)
Yeah.

Hello and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. I am joined today by Carolina Tortora, who is Head of AI, Innovation and Digitalisation at NESO. What a guest to have on, so thank you very much for joining us. I guess, would you be able to, yeah, start by introducing yourself, talk about what your role is at NESO I think it’s a really interesting place to apply

some of the modern sort of stuff that’s going on. So yeah, really keen to hear about what you’re up to.

Carolina (01:20)
Thanks for having me in today. So my name is Carolina Tortora and I head up what I call the AID team within NESO. AID because it stands for, you said, AI, Innovation and digitalisation sector, now within the AID team, we really look at everything from the strategy bit, both for AI and innovation. We develop a NESO wide strategy for artificial intelligence that sets an AI first kind of ambition.

But we also look at the whole energy sector and seeing how we can best enable all the other organisations in the industry to really up their game when it comes to artificial intelligence. On the innovation side, we work together with Ofgem and DESNZ to set some of those innovation challenges and priorities for the whole energy system. And then we work together with the rest of the industry in delivering the projects that address them most effectively. And then last but not least is the sector digitalisation piece.

within which we are delivering on Ofgem’s new role for us, which is the DSI coordinator, as well as supporting the rest of the industry on their digitalisation journey. So understanding and addressing where are the gaps, what they need to achieve, and how we can work most effectively with them to ensure that it gets us where it needs to be by 2030 and beyond.

Adam Sroka (02:39)
I mean, really interesting, but I imagine a really challenging role because it feels like a lot of your role from just first thinking about it is going to be trying to herd cats across organisational boundaries and trying to get other big parts of the industry that aren’t used to moving in quickly to move quickly and kind of adopt this stuff. I guess let’s rewind a little bit. Digitalisation and digital transformation.

What does that mean for the energy system and why is it so critical for like hitting net zero?

Carolina (03:13)
You use the term herding cats so I’d like to get that on the record. I never said. But it’s actually very much, I’ve used corralling sheep as another term. Now, the real challenge here when you talk about digitalisation journeys or change journeys, not only the fact that you need to bring about what is a cultural change, but it’s also and especially the fact that not everybody’s in the same place.

Adam Sroka (03:18)
I’m

Carolina (03:38)
So you will have those digitally native organisations which are so far advanced in their digital ways of working and thinking. Like yours is a perfect example of that. You’re already there. And then you have other parts of the industry where they’re still looking at the world from their own perspective. And the energy industry, it’s a very specific and particular one because we still have transformers on the grid from the 1960s and 70s because they work

because these are dumb machines. They do what they’re supposed to be doing. So until you have that, you know, old school is best school mentality in some pockets, it’s going to be hard to bring everybody about. This is, however, an extremely important transformation we cannot possibly get away with not doing. The reason for this is that the future is what I call a margins game. It’s not so much and not only about development. We’ve gone through

20, 30, 40 years in this industry where it’s all about building more and becoming bigger and developing more. The future is going to be about making do with less and trying to get as much value from the existing infrastructure and from the existing tools. The reason for that is, of course, cost of living crisis. First of all, UK is, you know, we’re undergoing what you’re aware of. So trying to ensure that we can make some economic decisions

and we are absolutely positive that we’re doing the best we can with what we have. But also especially because physical development, as in the development of the grid, is not going to move fast enough to actually be able to support the transformation that we need to go through as an industry. And that’s where the digital

piece comes into play because digital is quicker. You can fail faster, it’s more agile and allows you to really get an understanding, deep understanding of the infrastructure and how to best use it.

Adam Sroka (05:35)
That’s a really important point and why a lot of newer entrants in the kind of like the tech sphere kind of entrance into energy massively underestimate the inertia when it comes to traditional systems right and the culture that I think is quite correct in that old school is best school, I love that like this machine isn’t very smart but it always worked and it has done 50 years. It doesn’t fall over and we know how to fix it.

We are bumping into like, yeah, okay, actually there’s a skill shortage for high voltage stuff and some of the manufacturing is really difficult now, but these things survive and we were talking to AWS recently about their vision for what could go on in the energy sector and there was some discussion around the online migration or the cloud migration of SCADA systems. And actually like you could do a lot of the SCADA system

sort of compute in the cloud, right? And yeah, okay, that is true. But I just sat thinking that is going to be a long battle to convince the people that control those systems that is going to be the way to do it. And how do you come away from the machine that they can go and visit and touch and like interface with? That’s why I love it, right? It’s a really messy, complicated, like difficult system that

there are literal lives on the line, right? Like some of these things, like things can’t break, they can’t fall over. NESO is like right at the heart of it all and we’ve got like the biggest, most complicated grid, and all these wonderful products and markets and things. I guess you’re a really central role in the energy system. How do you envision like leveraging your position to enable the rest of the industry to kind of move on this journey?

Carolina (06:58)
Yeah.

That’s an interesting question because there’s going to be a combination of things. On the one hand, being at the heart of the energy sector means that we are aware of almost all of it. Of course, you will have some blind spots, especially when it comes to what we call the last mile, so the end customer or consumer link. So there’s a bit there that we need to strengthen our own understanding on. But we try to leverage our position

by looking into some of the new roles we’ve picked up. So the strategic energy planning is a perfect example. So that gives us a view of how the entire energy sector is going to evolve, how it should evolve in order to fulfill some of the ambitions that the government has set for GB. So having this long-term view and then at the same time, all the way up to the real-time view that you get from the control room.

Gives us the ability to have this full 360 almost spherical understanding of the energy sector and that’s how we prioritise. That’s how we look at where should we operate? Where should we change? Where do we enable? How do we help? And especially where are the low hanging fruits and where are the ones that we need to focus on most urgently? DSI is a perfect example for that. We realised that

almost everything we wanted to do. You know, it’s funny because my first job was innovation. Like I started by working exclusively on innovation, but I could do absolutely nothing until I had the right models in place. And I couldn’t get those right models in place because the data was crap underneath it. And then I realised that it wasn’t just our data, it was everybody’s data. And, you know, and this kind of like Matryoshka sort of conversation is what brought us into

looking at the sector digitalisation and the DSI. So finding ways to address the challenges, the energy challenges brought me necessarily towards on my own digital journey, my own cultural change and shift and that’s where we’re at, and that’s where NESO is really working. This is how we can see how to address those problems.

Adam Sroka (09:27)
Yeah, I guess you’ve got the fun like advantage of you can act as exemplar of like what good digital transformation looks like and the benefits and show a use case that everyone is quite visible to everybody. And you could also kind of force feed people like what’s right for them almost like better interfaces, better data governance and things like that by setting standards and boundaries that say okay, well actually to interface with these systems, you need to slowly boil your

kind of tech maturity to a level where it’s up to par with where we’re going forward. I guess like there are deep engineering roots across the system. We’ve talked about this already, but like what do you think the biggest cultural challenges are to achieving that? Like improving data quality, improving technical standards and focusing on the digital side more so than the infrastructure side.

Carolina (10:19)
I think, let’s start from the easy bits. The easy bits are the greenfield stuff, new things. When you’re building new stuff, you can set your new standards. You can set, you know, new rules and everything, and it’s easier. The hard bit is when we go back into existing processes, existing models, existing ways of working and that’s where I find myself, where I struggle. I think there’s challenges.

I mentioned more than once, culturally and the best way to describe it is you’ve got your power systems. I’ll explain to you how NESO is. So you’ve got your power systems engineers, and these are, you know, barons within the organisation. They literally design the system. They understand how it moves and ironically, I used to work for Terna, which is the Italian transmission system operator and it was the same thing back then. We knew who those

brilliant, almost Gandalf, wise men, most of them were men actually, were. And they knew the grid really well and everybody respected them and everybody knew that whatever they said was law and same at National Grid at first and NESO now, you have that. However, you understand that now the grid is changing, the system is changing, it’s becoming infinitely more complex.

You’ve heard this more than once. Things are happening faster. Things are happening in more complicated ways. There’s way too many scenarios that we cannot, it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. I work with some incredibly smart people. You will never be able to take all of that into account. So the reality is, is that they need those digital tools. Then you have the digital support people and you know, they don’t have that power systems engineering background. So from their perspective, they understand the technology

but they’re not really that familiar with the use cases. They try, but they’re never going to become power systems engineers with 40 years of experience and knowing how the grid works. So the real clash is between those two profiles and this happens in NESO and it happens everywhere else in the industry. The industry still sees digital as IT almost, just the enabling thing. They don’t understand the difference between the people who

Adam Sroka (12:26)
Yeah.

Carolina (12:31)
set up your phones and your laptops and the people who develop those complex tools. So when I say cultural change, there’s a bit of trying to bring those two together so that they understand the use case and the available technology and how it can support. But something’s got to give, right? There needs to be a letting go of control piece. I’m struggling to see that still.

Adam Sroka (12:54)
And like, almost like we paid you to say some of this stuff, because I totally like that’s the reason Hypercube exists. I saw this when I was working at Origami as Head of Machine Learning that so many of our customers like you couldn’t walk into their environment just as a

data scientist, a tech person and be useful without months and months of onboarding around the actual use case and like generalist techies, you can okay optimise things that are further away from the customer but it was really difficult to be useful without understanding some of what is this really complicated system and so yeah I started Hypercube as that can we start to really layer in and try and build that expertise and bridge that gap for people.

And yeah, we’re never gonna be power systems engineers, but we might hire some eventually, right? That was always the vision. I talk about this in my writing quite a lot how I deeply believe the tech is easy bit, right? the technical. Yeah. Like if you, I can find you a thousand boffins that will code you the best models and the best databases and the best optimisers and whatever you need. But what.

Carolina (13:52)
It is a commodity. Ultimately, technology is a commodity.

Adam Sroka (14:04)
what problems should they solve and how do get them to work together and how do I get you to trust what they’re going to do? That’s the hard bit that’s why it’s like the whole analogy of a journey, I think it’s really important because you want to bring people along with you and why should they trust you? The thing we spot a lot in bigger energy organisations is that persona of like Derek from IT who

said, we tried this in the nineties and this was done before and it didn’t work. And because of well, actually he was sold this promise 30 years ago and it didn’t work. And so what’s different today? Okay. We believe the technology has come on further, but we’ve like the burden of proofs on us, right. As the people trying to create the change and bring that journey on. One of our customers, when we engage with them,

that point around IT laptops and digital change. One of our customers had a job advert up for a computer engineer as the person that was going to build their database and their integrations and their models. That was the job title and the role profile they had and it was a mishmash of things they had seen on the internet and it just shows you that the education piece isn’t there. There’s a lot of like educating everyone on what this means and I think that’s really clearly reflected. I’d love to get your take on

this is really clearly reflected in take a like a new developer building a wind farm or building a BESS site. The percentage of spend on the infrastructure versus the digital assets is so asymmetric. It’s unbelievable. It’s like £600 million for phase one of the wind farm and we’ll hire two IT people and that’s the whole tech team. Like what do you see in that space and how do we change it?

Carolina (15:30)
Yeah.

If I knew, I would have applied it myself. So what I did is I started for me really and I see this cultural clash. I interpret it almost the same way that I interpret my own cultural clash. So I’ve worked in the US, I’ve worked in Italy, I’m now in Great Britain and every time, you know, there is a cultural clash in the way that people work, in the way that people approach you and approach problems and as the foreigner,

in-house, you’re always seen as the outsider and you have to figure out the angle at which you come in, in a way that it’s ultimately productive because there is zero win in, I’m right. The win is we’re working together. That’s to me is crystal clear. So I try to use the same approach from a digital perspective, which is you come in humble. You always appreciate that.

They’ve been holding the grid and they’ve been operating this grid safely and securely for 30, 40 years. That’s the first thing to have in mind. It’s clear that they don’t understand you because they’ve never really needed you before. So you, you come in with that understanding that this is just new to them and they’ve never needed it. Just like you’re coming into a new country or you’re coming into a new world. They never had to work with an Italian for the most part. So they have no idea and you’re the one who wanted to come in or you’re the one

who apparently brings value to them. So you come with the same sort of attitude of, you know, how can we effectively work together going forward? You know, I’ve been having conversations across the organisation and one of the things that works best is to start small with small pods and identifying use cases that can deliver value very quickly. So for example, in AI, we’ve identified three

use cases, and we’re focusing full on those. We’ve created small groups from, which is a combination of, you know, our normal operational colleagues, as well as some of our digital and technology colleagues and you put them together, you create almost like a product pod and you create a micro world where their cultures have an opportunity to clash without affecting, you know, rippling across the organisation.

But then it’s their wins, it’s their accomplishments, it’s their conflict, and then their own resolution. I’ll let you know if that works, because I’ve talked to a lot of people and that seems to be the approach that everybody swears by so far.

Adam Sroka (18:22)
100% agree. I see it as like you have to kind of warm up the iceberg. Like if you’ve got a lot of like gentle massaging, and you do need to bring these people on the journey, because I think that there’s a lot of hubris in technology and our side of technology around like, here’s the new best way of doing things and this is it. And that might be what the tech industry and Silicon Valley and whoever’s saying, we might see all this wonderful wizardry over there, right?

But you bring it into a domain where things work and they work fine. But there’s some optimisation to be done and there’s like an undertone that I’ve spotted a few times that the customer in our case or the expert, the energy systems expert catches, which is the way you’ve done this for 30 years is wrong and here’s the, you should have been doing it like this. Here’s the way to do this. Here’s the better model. Here’s the better system. you shouldn’t have done that like that because it’s actually really simple if you do it this way.

And that’s like totally wrong because these people aren’t stupid and they made the best decisions with the information they had at the time and the context and there’s reasoning. I think we miss that in going all gung-ho on like technology and you need to do this. Especially when then they catch wind of other areas that are less mission critical where stuff falls over and it breaks. They’re going to then use those as examples for why, well, actually you’re wrong and thank you very much for insulting my last 30 years of work.

Carolina (19:29)
Yeah.

against,

it’s that arrogance that just doesn’t work.

CP30 is coming, you know, like we need to achieve this. This is a problem we need to solve. How do we work together effectively to make that happen?

And then you bring that, you run your gap analysis and you bring that as close as possible to real time and then in real time, this is in your little pod. You don’t agree with my requirements or you don’t agree with how I developed this tool. That’s the problem that we need to solve. The tool is not doing what it needs to be doing. Let’s work together so that we can solve that. It’s that can do attitude that we really need to develop.

Adam Sroka (20:21)
Yeah, I wholly agree with that, because you want to ultimately transfer ownership of these new workflows, new tools onto the person that you’re delivering them for, right? And if you come in hostile, that’s not going to work and I think men particularly aren’t very good at this. Sometimes you get a lot of like ego clashing and bashing that doesn’t quite land.

Carolina (20:42)
Get it from men, but honestly, there’s a lot of that from women as well. Everyone is, even those who are not naturally arrogant, it’s a normal response. If you’re treating me like you’re superior to me, then I will be even worse off than you are.

Adam Sroka (20:55)
Yeah.

So we talked a little bit earlier about data and it being actually pivotal to even doing any kind of innovation at all. We all know that the kind of hype always talks about everyone is aware that you need good quality data to do AI. But

I always find that it’s very surface level and everyone goes, mm-hmm, yeah. But actually, if you go down a level, what does that mean? Like in the energy system, from where you sit in NESO, what does good data practice look like, good governance, and how can organisations, big complex organisations, improve it? And further, how can like cross-organisational stuff improve?

Carolina (21:34)
We talked about culture. We talked about some of the fundamental issues in the energy industry and how backwards we are in certain things or how forward we are in many others and we treat data as a problem, and to me, data is a symptom of all of this. So data as a word is normally being seen as it’s something that is a digital problem. It’s normally fix it for me to the

digital and technology teams, when in reality, it is the wider business, the other functions that should be they own the data, they’re the ones who are actually responsible for it, that’s what I mean by a symptom, because I wouldn’t say it’s their problem, because we can, you know, the digital teams can support it, but it is absolutely theirs to own and to manage. So what does good governance mean we’ve got, you know, our Chief Data can

absolutely give you, regal you on all of our different assurance and governance policies and stuff. But essentially, for me, this is a very simple thing. It’s good data at the right time, where I know where it’s come from. It’s assured, it’s robust, and it’s secure. So you get those six things in order, and you’re OK. The problem is that, you know, I mentioned earlier.

The whole energy system is not all in the same place and sitting at the heart of it, it means that you will get this incredible, perfect data stream from certain organisations, the digitally native organisations. And then, you know, we just recently managed to get rid of fax machines because there are some organisations that were sending us those faxes. It’s not a question that we wanted to keep them and because of our role, we kind of

have to accept whatever comes our way. It’s not up to us to say, no, I’m not going to work with you because you are bad at it. So we have to take everything and now that we are evolving in some of our roles, especially the regional energy system planning, and we have to work with local councils, that means that we even have to work with their level of digital maturity. And some will have actual PDFs, not even PDFs, like printouts.

Adam Sroka (23:45)
filing.

Yeah.

Carolina (23:46)
Files and stuff and we have to take it, right? So that’s kind of like how we need to go forward.

It is a not one answer for all. It’s more of a tailoring the different approach to all. And I think of these things. I don’t know if this is going to make sense to you. It doesn’t make sense to all of them. I don’t know if you have like, so Amazon Alexa at home and you have smart plugs and you have smart devices. So this is like the difference between a smart lamp and a dumb lamp. So the smart lamp,

automatically connects to Alexa and it can dim and it can switch on and switch off and so on. Some lamps are not smart. So what you do is you put a smart plug. So it’s a plug that talks to Alexa. So you’re pretty much retrofitting intelligence to something that is not intelligent. The digital journey to me is there like there are some that are actual smart devices. So clearly I can access a number of different things. The data is going to be better and I can do better things with them.

But But to work with the dumber devices I’m going to need a smart plug. So that is my smart interface where I can take whatever they give me, but I can translate it or I can clearly not with the same level of intelligence, but I can do enough to be able to operate it fairly and more intelligently across the whole organisation. That’s what we’re trying to identify.

Adam Sroka (25:15)
That’s a great analogy. I love that and it will land with a lot of people in the space. I will have to steal that one. I’ll be sure to credit you. But yeah, that’s great. Hopefully, Hypercube can be a bit of a smart plug in some situations for some moments. You mentioned just about, like data governance and data sort of offices within NESO and I just think a lot of people bump into this as a problem. I’d love to get your take.

Carolina (25:27)
Yeah.

Adam Sroka (25:38)
How do you find the balance between doing innovation and keeping the governance and the quality high? Because in many large organisations, they’re different people or different teams, and they just clash heads all the time. Ones go fast, ones go slow. How do you find that balance? And any advice for people out there trying to navigate that world?

Carolina (25:49)
Thank

I’ll tell you what my boss tells me Shubhi, which is if you’re finding that conflict, it’s the right conflict to be in. Right. So it means that as innovation, as Head of Innovation you’re pushing the right things and the right button and your security and data governance is pushing back because they’re trying to ensure that this is done correctly and properly. Now, you know that the conflict is unhealthy when innovation does not win.

You want innovation to happen, but you want it to happen in the most secure possible way that you can. Again, we are a NESO. So just to test the cool AI tool, I cannot exactly black out the country, right? So I need to make sure that what I’m doing is pushing the right buttons, but at the same time, doing the safest possible way. Another thing that I’m going to quote is my other boss, the CEO, so Fintan, who said, don’t

think that the entire organisation has a single risk profile or risk appetite. Depending on where you go, you’re going to have a different approach to risk. So clearly control room has zero risk appetite and I want to keep it that way, Carolina, please. Right. So, but then as you move into the programming or planning phases, so there’s more chances there to get it wrong so that you know how to best get it right. So my advice to people is.

On the innovation side, keep pushing because that’s your job. You need to make people uncomfortable because if they’re not uncomfortable, if there’s no conflict, there’s no learning. The only way I’ve ever learned anything is by disagreeing with people. So you need to create that environment, but at the same time, recognise where you can do that versus where you cannot. So have the wisdom to approach the right people in the right way.

Adam Sroka (27:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. And I don’t know why it reminds me of a conversation we had with some bankers and some lawyers and they said, they took the approach of how do we get comfortable with this, like together. Again, it’s that us versus the problem thing versus like, you are the problem. Like, okay, there is value in doing this thing. We’ve maybe missed a mark. How do we as a collective get comfortable with doing this thing, and you can adopt some more mature approaches. But that’s really interesting. And I like that being uncomfortable.

I want to ask you some questions about the Data Sharing Infrastructure and just want to define what it is for the audience and what are expectations for it and how it goes from pilot to full implementation.

Carolina (28:27)
Yes.

I’m going to tell you the story behind the DSI, at least NESO’s journey into it, because like everything else, we didn’t come to it from a, this is cool, let’s build a digital perspective. We came at it from the actual use case. I don’t have a computer science or power systems engineering background, to be honest. I’ve got a systems background, I do aeronautics.

In aeronautics, you do bit of everything, a bit of electrical, a bit of mechanical, a bit of civil, because you need to build this aerospace, you need to build these structures and make sure that they operate. So I take that approach to everything and one of the things that I noticed when I first joined in the company, and it’s in various, like, know, iterations was the fact that we needed, as I said, new models to represent new things and how the grid was evolving. To do that, we needed better data.

So that’s where I got backwards, like to solve this, I need to solve this, to solve this, I need to solve this and whatnot. So I moved back into that journey. The idea being, I wanted to build a digital twin of the entire energy system. That would have been the ideal, like the dream, right? So if I had a model of everything, I can operate this model, like,

put in different inputs and see how it evolves and that would allow me to really solve everything that the company does all the way up to the control room. So this we launched at COP 2022, I think it was, it was the one in Glasgow and that was a brilliant idea and everybody was excited about it. So first problem is how do you create those digital twins?

And then you realise for a digital twin, it needs to have live data from the rest of the grid, because every component of the grid will evolve or will behave relative to how it’s connected to other things and the inputs that it’s getting from the other things. So then from there, you’re like, okay, so this is a virtual energy system because you’re essentially creating digital twins to represent every component and you’re creating a data sharing infrastructure to replicate what

the grid does today. So, but instead of moving electron, it’s going to move this but live so that it gives you an actual representation of everything. So that’s how we got to this journey. In the meantime, government was going through its own path of the energy digitisation. At first, it was a data task force and a digitalisation task force. Then came the principles for open data sharing and so on.

And a lot of the new organisations and the startups were saying, give me more data, give me access to more information. I want to be able to contribute to decarbonisation, but I don’t have the right information to be able to develop the right products. So this was all happening and that’s when we stepped up as NESO and said, we need it. We really need it because we want to build this huge thing and we want to improve our own modelling and we want to be able to do a better job and get better margin

and reduce costs to the consumer. We’ll start building it. What we came up with, so we collaborated with the Digital Twin Hub and together we worked on a concept of as light as possible a layer to communicate with everyone in the industry to set those standards for data sharing

and making sure that we can all safely exchange data, of course, everyone with their own access and permissions and stuff. But that’s how it all came about.

Adam Sroka (31:52)
Exciting, it’s a big ambition. Like, and it’s one of those things that I think it’d be very easy to get lost in the weeds, but from talking to you, sounds like you are very use case focused and I think that’s like, that’s definitely the way I build it. Like pick use cases, deliver them, expand and grow. In that mindset, have you any inklings for like, what are the biggest lever use cases? What

are you thinking you’re going to tackle first that’s going to deliver the most value? Where does AI come in? Does it have a place in the first generation of this stuff?

Carolina (32:25)
So we started by use cases so we did a first a pilot that was looking at something I would call system access planning. So that is a process that NESO goes through with the transmission operators where they pretty much send out their data saying, this is the status of my infrastructure. This is where I’m going to have the out of services. This is where I’m having planned maintenance. This is, and so on.

NESO consolidates that information from all the different TOs and comes up with a game day plan. So this is what the situation awareness of the day comes. These are where the traffic lights are going to be. This is where there’s going to be a blockage. This is where you’re going to have better access and so on. So that was a pilot that we did. Now we’re going through the MVP phase.

So we’re actually building it. And the first use case that we’re looking at is what we call RESP, so Regional Energy Systems Planning. So the cool thing about looking at RESP is that it’s everything that you mentioned. So it’s not just about data and it’s data from electricity, distribution, transmission, from gas transmission, distribution, because in regional plan, you’ve got a bit of everything coming together. So it’s different data species from the whole energy

sector, which is pretty cool and it’s part of our uniqueness, the fact that we have access to this whole round data set. But it’s also overlaying it with our civil data. So where the highways are, where the streets are locally, what the demand is in that particular area. As I’m explaining to you all of this, of course, you have to use AI because there is no way that you can process all of that information and create a plan.

You know, or advice on a plan for a local council without the support of artificial intelligence to consume and, you know, and actually operate on that data.

Adam Sroka (34:25)
I think that’s really interesting and if you build it in that way, one of the big benefits we see for our customers that go like early and try an AI pilot is yeah, you get some really clever stuff and the use case you deliver value, but actually like a kind of unforeseen benefit or unplanned benefit that we talk about a lot now is that it democratises the interface to the new tool. Because if you’ve built it in a way that it’s easily understandable and explainable by AI

tooling, then everyone can use a chat interface, right? Everyone, if you can expose chat interfaces that enable non-technical business users route into like trying to convey their message at the new pipeline, the new forecast, the new plan or whatever, and get an answer back with something that’s quite like patient and can explain parts and run the same queries.

Carolina (34:59)
Yeah.

Adam Sroka (35:19)
That wasn’t really around before and I think like, yeah, five years ago, you would bump into those non-technical users really frustrating the data scientists and stuff, because that user experience just wasn’t quite there. So it’s exciting to see that. Yeah. That secondary benefit is hopefully going to bring other people on the journey. In my perspective, enable like more insights, more genius to be applied to the problems because not all the smartest people in the system are data people.

Carolina (35:31)
Yeah.

I love the word democratising and I don’t know if you remember like maybe 10 years ago, 8 years ago, we were talking about the different trends that were going to change the energy sector. And it was the, I think it was the three or four D’s that you’re talking about. It was digitalisation, decarbonisation, decentralisation and democratisation. This was like, you know, we’re talking

10 years ago, those were the four Ds that were gonna change the energy sector. So we are still undergoing that transformation, the digitalisation piece. We’re right in the middle of it. I think we just managed to convince people that it needs to happen. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that. On the decentralisation, it’s still a fight for the same reason. So as our generation is moving more and more towards the edges of our grids.

What are the implications of that in terms of complexity and even governance of the grid from the decentralisation, the decarbonisation, of course, we’ve all seen our objectives. then finally, democratisation to me is a rise of the consumer in many ways, not just as, you know, someone that we need to consider in most of our decisions, but also in the fact that they’re stepping up

themselves, they’re more aware of the footprint. We used to look and perceive consumers as a passive demand curve that depended exclusively on what day it was, what hour it was, and what the temperature was outside. When the reality is, that pandemic changed all of that and people are now, you know, I mentioned earlier, my phone was trying to connect to my car instead of connecting to your server because it was trying to

decide whether to charge the car, and such like that. So this is, for me, is a perfect example of how the world is changing and how, as a consumer, we have such a huge impact now on our grid and the way it operates.

Adam Sroka (37:45)
Yeah, and I think it’s interesting if you like those four Ds 10 years ago, like, first of all, what a great prediction that was, because I think it’s totally coming true. But you’re right, we are in the middle of all of it. Like it’s happening, EVs are happening. The decarbonisation is touch and go now in America, but the conversation sort of happening over here. We’ve got the decentralised piece, like, it’s I think give it another 10 years, I’d like to see where it gets but I’m hopeful.

Carolina (38:10)
I don’t think we have

the time. We don’t have the time to wait 10 years. We don’t have the time to wait 10 years, unfortunately. The thing is, we’ve moved in the decarbonisation piece, and the decentralisation, we have not moved as quickly on digitalisation and democratisation yet. I don’t think.

Adam Sroka (38:18)
How do I make space?

How do we make it go faster then? How do we just force it to go quicker? What’s the one big change we can make?

Carolina (38:36)
We need more unicorn.

By unicorns, I mean people who get both the digitalisation agenda and the energy agenda. If I can distinguish between the two, I find myself in meetings constantly round tables where you get either one or the other. No decisions will be taken. No, push forward will happen because

they all either agree with each other or they disagree, but there is no resolution. There’s no push forward. There’s a constant need to accelerate. I hear that every other meeting I’ve got so many lobbyists across the industry who think we’re moving too slow. They’re convinced that the slowness is given by the fact that NESO is doing it or such. They don’t understand that

it’s not a technology problem. It’s never a technology problem. It’s not that we’re not adopting the right solution. It’s a people problem. It’s a cultural problem. It’s the fact that we don’t have unicorns. There’s not enough unicorns in this industry. That’s the problem. My hope is that we can grow that next generation. So all of our energy people, the new ones, we’re exposing them to that digital world.

Vice versa, trying to get an interest from them. They’re the ones who are going to change the world, not us.

Adam Sroka (40:02)
That’s really interesting and it begs the question, do you you think that it’s possible for or plausible for like young startup kind of early stage forward thinking companies to have significant impact on the sector?

Carolina (40:18)
They always do right. So other industries have taught us that is that it’s the disruptors that actually bring about the change that you will get. You know, there’s in every industry, you’ve got examples of this from your Netflix and Blockbuster to your phone Nokia versus, you know, Apple and your laptops. So in every industry, you’ve got this

story of David and Goliath and how it’s a startup as a disruptor that just proved them wrong by doing. They show that it was going that way. So I think that it’s the same thing that is going to happen in the energy sector. The only difference is that it’s slower in our case because we’re so regulated and it is an industry that is run by powerful people

Adam Sroka (41:03)
Yeah.

Carolina (41:09)
and influential people and they move a lot of money and they move a lot of jobs and they’re always going to be heard. There’s a thousand examples of things that I cannot mention of times where even NESO has stood on the right side of history. So even though we are an incumbent, we were trying to push for certain reforms and changes and ultimately we were voted out of the island because someone way too powerful or some way too high interest were voted against.

So it’s happening everywhere in the world. It’s a harder climb for those startups, but it’s still, I think it’s absolutely what’s going to change us and shake us up.

Adam Sroka (41:46)
I kind of feel like that’s where we should end, I really want to actually it leads us into so you’ve opened a call for innovation at NESO, call for ideas, innovation. Is that the seed of the next thing? Do you think that’s going to help on that fight?

Carolina (42:04)
Innovation has a hard time in this industry and it’s not, you know, I’m going to say this once and it’s probably the only industry where money has not a problem. is being incredibly generous in their innovation funding and stuff. They’re pushing as hard as they can. The industry overall, like DESNZ has had billions for decarbonisation and innovation set aside. We’ve got UKRI, there’s so much funding.

That is available for those that know where to find it and how to get it and such. The problem we have in innovation is implementation of innovation. So deployment of innovation. There’s a few reasons behind this. One is because we are building a ship at sea and it’s difficult for me to change a system that is I cannot reboot the energy system. So I cannot tell people, so we’re going to have a blackout tonight because I’m changing some of the tools over there. I cannot do that.

But part of it, as I said, the entire theme of this whole conversation has been about culture and I’m going to tell you another word, trust. It’s about trusting that there is a better way and that it’s worth checking it out and testing it. It’s about culture and it’s about trust. Ultimately, it’s about people.

Adam Sroka (43:14)
I love it. I love it. Absolutely. Like just totally aligned to my career experience really of how to do tech well at scale. So for people that are listening, just give us a brief like one-liner on the call for ideas. How do people get involved? Like what’s the how do we win? Who’s what you’re looking for?

Carolina (43:30)
What I can tell you is what we’re looking for is.

Be original in your ideas, but be also aware of the physical laws of the world we live in. So one of the biggest challenges we have in some of the ideas is that they come from someone from people that are completely out of the industry. So I am full of ideas and people that would, you know, manage power flow across Great Britain in a better way, but they’re completely disregarding the fact that there is established markets.

There’s established rules of engagement. So the trick here, the brilliance here is study the energy system and understand what are its orthodoxies that you cannot possibly change and be innovative within those. I know that it’s more challenging in a way, but that’s exactly what we need. We need those cool ideas and the way to fully like, you know, take advantage of the funding or even our time is to

come in with that can do, but also humble attitude. I don’t understand this and I really want to support. I’ve got this idea. I don’t know if it will fit. Would I be able to have some time with some specialists to be able to develop it fully? That’s where we come into play as innovation.

Adam Sroka (44:40)
I wish everyone all the best and yeah it’s certainly something we’ll be applying to it just it’s a really cool

Carolina (44:43)
Yeah, it is

Honestly, it’s the coolest job in the company, I think, if not in the industry. So I’m quite excited. But it comes with its headaches.

Adam Sroka (44:52)
I can imagine. Well, look, it’s been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much. Before we let anyone leave, I always just like to ask if people want to find out more about you, about NESO, or if there’s anything you want to promote or plug, where should we direct them?

Carolina (45:06)
Of course, come either to my LinkedIn page, if it’s me directly, or we do have a page that you guys can land on NESO for innovation. For any proposals, not necessarily for this particular call for ideas, but in general, every time you have an idea, just reach out to our mailbox and send it in and someone from the team will contact you and we can see if it’s worth taking forward.

Adam Sroka (45:31)
Well, thank you once again for such an incredible conversation and I wish you all the best.

Carolina (45:35)
Thank you for your time.

You too.

Adam Sroka (45:42)
Thank you once again for listening to the Hypercube Energy podcast. As always, if you have any feedback or comments or you want to get involved, please get in touch. And if you want to find out more about what’s happening in data and AI across the energy sector, please join the Beyond Energy community and I look forward to speaking to you soon.