Alan Ross

I'm Alan Ross. I'm the managing editor of APC Media. We're here at the Doble Client Conference 2024 in Boston. As usual, there are incredible numbers of thought leaders here. This is the interview we wanted to do a year ago, with Matt Carrara. Matt is the President of Doble. Thank you for inviting us here at the Doble Client Conference 2024.

You've had a year since our last interview. What have you learned that you didn't know then?

Matthew Carrara

Well, it was interesting. You and I met at Distributech. When we did the interview, I was three months into the role, new to the industry, very nervous about what you were going to ask me and how I was going to respond. But my main focus for the last 12 months was learning about the business and the people first, and then focusing on the industry. As I'm driving the company into the future, I know what I need to focus on as a leader.

AR

I can tell you from knowing a lot of your people, especially some of your old timers, that are the knowledge people at Doble, they like it. Whatever you're doing, they like it. That's really important, because you are steering the ship. When was Doble founded?

MC

Our 100-year-anniversary was last year, and then last year was the 90th client conference. A lot of history, a lot of legacy, a lot of knowledge.

AR

We're going to come back to the client conference at the end, but I want to get to something else. You said, learn the people, learn the company, learn the industry. Now I'm going to assume you know enough We're talking about the industry. But our industry, the power industry, has gone through more change in the last 5-7 years than we have in 100 years before. That brings us up to a point. What is that point? Where are we right now in the industry as you see it?

MC

I think where we are right now is that we know the infrastructure is a challenge, and we know there's a huge amount of demand that's going on the grid. One of the things that I spoke about in my opening yesterday was last year, they had forecasted a demand for the grid for the last for the next five years. It came out at the end of last year, and it's two times the amount. One of my messages yesterday was, you're driving budgets, OpEx, CapEx, you're driving hiring practices, and the government is bringing down funding for utility companies. And then, all of a sudden you realize, I need twice as much. Right now, I think there's a little bit of a choke on the industry on funding, on components, on people, on how do we continue to grow and expand the grid.

AR

The government has really been pouring money into infrastructure, particularly green infrastructure. They brought it down to a point that wind and solar is now cost-effective in terms of generation. It seems like now they're pulling out, and they're expecting private money to come in. From that perspective, the good news is you have a perspective of other industries, so you bring some perspective that might be very helpful for where we are. Do you see capital coming into the industry that might make up that gap?

MC

We certainly see a lot of capital coming in, but going on wind and solar, as you know, we have a group that is in that space right now. What we're finding is it's not about investment, it's not about money, it's the time for the permitting to take place. Again, there's another chokehold in that area. But yes, a lot of the wind farms and solar farms are being handled and managed by private organizations. Then they take them, they activate them, and then they sell them off. But right now, it's the same challenge we see in the utility space. It's components, timing, and people.

AR

DOE doesn't have the authority to grant permits because it's state, local. There are 50 different state regulators, and they all have a different way of looking at things. But that idea of getting people together to smooth out the permitting process and you'll make this transition. We're still not there yet.

MC

There's a graphic that I had seen last month that shows how long it takes for the money, once it's identified, to roll down to the organization, it's 30+ steps, and it can stop anywhere along the way. So yes, there's all this money available, but it's not sitting in people's bank accounts. It's still funneling through the process. That's a big thing we have to break.

AR

30+ steps? That's crazy. That's where we are today. Now, I got the harder question. If I asked 10 different people this same question, I would get 17 different answers, because halfway through, they would change their answer. Where do you see the industry going over the next 5-7 years?

MC

I think the challenge is the same one we spoke about last year. It's what to do with the data. A part of the issue is that you have a group of individuals in the industry that are now retiring and moving on to the latter part of their either life or their career, and you have a bunch of new people coming in. There's a big gap of knowledge between these experienced people who are retiring, and new people in the industry. Many newcomers are coming to us for training, for information. What can we do with all the data for them? Can we do the analysis for them? I think you're going to a big migration to data continuing, I'll say, 1-5 years. But the challenge is that someone needs to find a way to aggregate all of that data, which makes sense to the utility company because we're being tasked with making the decision for them that they can then validate before they make a change or make an adjustment.

AR

To me, it's data. It's funny that I was at a transformer committee meeting, IEEE transformer committee meeting. This was years ago. Did you know that Doble was the only company that had failure data that they had collected for years? Everybody else collected condition data, but they didn't know if that transformer failed or was taken out of service because it was aging, because most of the utilities did it because it was aging, not because it failed. But the idea is, it not just the data, it's also the analysis of it.

MC

To me, it's data. It's funny that I was at a transformer committee meeting, IEEE transformer committee meeting. This was years ago. Did you know that Doble was the only company that had failure data that they had collected for years? Everybody else collected condition data, but they didn't know if that transformer failed or was taken out of service because it was aging, because most of the utilities did it because it was aging, not because it failed. But the idea is, it not just the data, it's also the analysis of it.

AR

It's the amount of data, AI and ML. Whenever somebody says they use AI, I say we are not really using it now, because we don’t really fully understand it. We're publishing an article in our next issue, and it is about AI for the non-AI CEO I'm going to send that to you. I'll take it. It was done by an expert, by the way.

MC

If you remember, last year at Distributech it was all about data and software. No mention of AI. This year, walking through Distributech, I'd say every other booth features AI, and it was the same thing we had seen last year. It's new, and I think people have to start understanding how to use it.

AR

What really struck me at Distributech was the number of non-traditional people that were there, like Dell computers. We did an interview with the head of IBM, and suddenly they're doing a lot in the power industry. But a lot of non-traditional people for this industry were coming in because they are communications people, they're data management people. They're all trying to get a piece of the pie. With that said, ISO 55 000 was developed to do a line of sight of assets for organizations. Ten years ago, I was the President of the Electric Power Reliability Alliance, so we were looking at ISO 55 000 primarily for large industrials. We weren't doing it for utilities. However, the first company to try to do ISO 55 000 was PG&E, the big end. They did it on their G-side, the gas side. They found over 200 major online working gas component assets that they no longer had on their books. Think about that from a safety standpoint. They were written off, because the finance guys go don’t see value in it.

They decided not to do it on their electrical side. I think they were afraid to find out. But the idea that ISO 55 000 is creating this demand for a line of sight. The CEO sees what he needs to see, and so on. Doble plays a huge role in data that the CEO can see, but the engineer on the ground can also see. Talk a little bit about that.

MC

If you look at the majority of the software that we sell, it's collecting points of data from our own equipment. That's collecting data around condition monitoring, transformer analysis. We have an ability to do advanced transformer failure analysis through our software packages. We're not exactly at the CEO level yet because there's still some ERP challenges around, for example, can you take our data and put it on your ERP system? We're working on bridges for that. And Dell happens to be a partner of ours that we use for testing as well. We're trying to get into this boardroom to field type of view. We're one step away from the boardroom, but we do it more at the maintenance and the engineering level.

AR

I can say this to you. They like pictures and charts and color, and what they don't like is red. When they see red, they go, something’s wrong, go fix it.

MC

They're looking at it differently. The person that's running the substation is looking at reliability. He's looking at downtime. The person in the boardroom is looking at one thing: what are the finances of it?

AR

You just said another word that I love, reliability, because I'm a reliability engineer and a member of the IEEE Reliability Society. I like to think that I brought reliability in because the first time I saw Doble use the word reliability was about a year after I used the word reliability. But now, reliability has dropped a little bit. Resilience is a huge issue in the industry because we've got all these events, fire, hurricanes. Even at a time when we shouldn't be having a tornado, we have a tornado whipping through the country. Reliability is keeping the power on. Resilience is about get it back on because the lights went out. Talk a little bit about how Doble is working on resilience for your clients.

MC

For us, it's the same message. It's around the data and the clarity of what's happening now and what could happen in the future. A lot of times, you're looking at the delivery of transformers. A transformer goes down, you're waiting 2-3 years because of backlogs to get one in. We're now telling our clients, That transformer is going to fail in two years. Now they can start ordering on an earlier time frame. Resilience is only as quick as the equipment that you can put in to replace it. Right now, we know we have a chokehold on that. The backlogs for equipment, bushings and bushing taps and transformers are years. We have to do a better job of giving them advanced notice of a failure so they can react quicker instead of reacting the day it happens. That's a weather event, that's a power outage, that is an unforeseen circumstance.

AR

The owners of power transformers also need to look out after the ones they’ve got, especially knowing that in some instances they cannot get new ones for three years. For example, they should be careful not to overload. There's a lot of ways that they can mitigate damage, but the goal is to get more life in your transformers. The average power transformer owned by Austin Energy in their network is something close to 48 years old. They made a decision to go after a 75-year life of their transformers because they said, Do what you need to do to make sure that the asset lasts 75 years. They were built to last 20. They did last 50. Now you're asking, that's like trying to get the 1912 de Soto to last. We've abused this equipment, and now we got to stop abusing it. But part of the change that's going on, and this is my last question for you, is you're here at the Doble Client Conference. I know that you know everything that everybody was doing, because you needed to know. What did you say to your people internally about why you wanted this client conference to attract more people here than any other client? How many people are even here?

MC

I just looked at it before we came on, over 1,300 people came this year. That's the biggest we've had ever in the history of the show.

AR

There's a reason, and so you must have a message for what you wanted internally your people to focus on.

MC

The quick message for me was getting the people that attend this show and those that don't attend the show to come next year, and to show we're a trusted partner. We're helping the utility system get through this journey. We're giving them the data and the information and the testing they need to secure and make sure that the asset is reliable and resilient. But at the end of the day, the message was, we want to be your partner. We've done a really good job this year. This is, like I said, the biggest show ever.

At the end of the day, people are coming to this show to learn. We're pushing the learning, the conferences, the training. There's a lot of collaboration over 642 specific clients in the utility industry, sitting in sessions, exchanging ideas, talking about storm preparedness, how to react to a transformer that goes down, how to react to another situation, be it domestic terrorism, or maybe someone put a virus in the system. We’re hoping the show gets bigger and bigger, and we want to show that Doble's 100 years of data and experience can help them as we move forward.

AR

Is there cross collaboration with some of the utilities at some of these events? Are they being able to share with each other?

MC

Yes, because most of the committees that people are sitting in are people from various types of utility companies. I've noticed that the collaboration and the discussions are open because they're all facing the same challenges. If they can learn from each other, help improve the grid and help improve keeping the lights on, and we can be part of it, I think it's wonderful.