The utility industry is losing one of our best thought leaders in
grid modernization - at least for the time being. Chris came to the
utility industry and PG&E with a background in communications, business and
venture capital - not your standard utility guy pedigree. With that
background came a unique skill set and view of infrastructure that truly helped
the industry foster new ideas on how we need to apply advanced communications, sensing
and control technologies to modernize and extract more value from electric
power infrastructure. Chris has been a leader in developing utility
technology development laboratories within the utility to ensure that he and
his team were in a position to understand all of the technology they are
considering for grid modernization and consumer empowerment. Most other
industries do this as a matter of doing business but utilities have been
notoriously behind the curve in this regard. Utilities have often relied
upon vendors to tell them what they need rather than utilities developing the
necessary requirements and technology understanding to more directly specify
what they need. Several utilities under the leadership of key thought
leaders like Chris have managed to turn this trend around in recent years.
Southern California Edison (SCE) was probably the first and Chris the
most recent.
As I write this is occurs to me that it is striking that several of
our most influential thought leaders have left or about to leave their
respective utilities - Paul De Martini (SCE), Wayne Longcore (Consumers
Energy), Brent Hodges (Reliant Energy), Scott Blackburn (FPL) and now Chris Knudsen. I sure hope this is not a trend
indicating that that dynamic, bright, and well spoken individuals are not able
to accomplish their business and professional objectives in a utility
environment - that would be most unfortunate. We need leaders such as
Chris and the others I mentioned to help us transform our industry in all
aspects necessary to ensure that we modernize our aging infrastructure.
We need that transformation to occur before it begins to fail more often
and in time to support new energy sources before energy prices skyrocket due to
neglect and expensive last minute fixes.
I have had the pleasure to work with Chris Knudsen for a couple of
years now in several roles - I turned over the reins of the chairmanship of
OpenSG group under the UCAIug to Chris and have worked with him closely as
secretary to move that organization forward under his leadership. I have
also had the pleasure to work for Chris as a contractor to provide PG&E
engineering services developing an enterprise architecture framework and
approach to support smart grid application evolution. I am pleased to
learn that Chris will be continuing in his OpenSG chairman role and I wish him
all the best in his future endeavors. I hope we see him in another role
in our industry where his intellect, experience, and leadership can be best
utilized.
