Sessions

Heads of companies and thought leaders discuss specific challenges they have to meet their decarbonization goals or those set by government agencies, and how R&D can help individual companies and industries. The panel would focus on specific challenges and opportunities industries are facing, on electrification and its limits, and on specific measures/technologies needed.

Initiate is the hub at DISTRIBUTECH to hear about new technology, innovation, and up and coming talent in the energy sector. There will be 25 amazing startup companies pitching for a chance to win an award from Duke Energy and Clarion Energy Events. Stop by booth #3755 on the POWERGEN side to hear pitches and content centered around energy innovation.

Take 5 for a drink and a quick chat at our cantina receptions located throughout the exhibit hall

Networking Bar Locations:

Company	Booth Number
Cleaveland Price	1322
Burns & McDonnell	2941
ABB	2323
Sensus	1723
Black & Veatch	2115
Urbint	3353
Generac Grid Services	3233
NV5 Geospatial	235
IFS/Clevest	723
Investissement Quebec	1015
Exelon Clearsight	1247
Utility Broadband Alliance	1026

This session explores how SDG&E used its innovation framework to develop use cases for extended reality (XR). The utility is in the process of operationalizing this technology through an “XR Factory” where it will build out 10-15 future use cases per year to be used throughout the business, including emergency response, operations visualization, field maintenance, real-time simulations, and more. Immersive training with XR allows for rapid response to evolving challenges and helps to train teams while reducing their exposure to risk – improving their safety and overall operational efficiency, particularly during times of crisis.

Initiate is the hub at DISTRIBUTECH to hear about new technology, innovation, and up and coming talent in the energy sector. There will be 25 amazing startup companies pitching for a chance to win an award from Duke Energy and Clarion Energy Events. Stop by booth #3755 on the POWERGEN side to hear pitches and content centered around energy innovation.

The always complicated process forced upon developers and builders of new energy projects gets more challenging and problematic every year. Financial constraints, regulatory hurdles, political pressures, and, last but not least, environmental goals are not always in alignment, so utilities and their EPC partners have hard rows to hoe in bringing those together. This session will look at how both utilities, system operators, and contractors navigate the building of the road to Destination 2050. This session will look at how the IOUs, IPPS, EPCs, and public power planners are using new architectural goals and methods to create the path to net-zero.

Predictive maintenance is one of the most iconic use cases of IoT and artificial intelligence (AI). While the productivity, operational efficiency, and cost-saving benefits of predictive maintenance programs are easy to grasp, real-life implementations are beset with false alerts, miscalibrated algorithms, scaling issues, and poor ROI for monitoring asset portfolios. In this session, C3 AI will share stories and lessons learned from using AI & ML to enable utilities to achieve higher levels of asset availability and signification reduction of O&M costs.  Learn how integrating a wide variety of internal and external data creates a reliable dynamic risk score for 10s of thousands assets; how closed loop machine learning maintains and improves model performance; how explainability and empowering operators to take action within a single plane of glass increases both trust and adoption; and how an accurate assessment of asset health drives replacement cycles and increases capital deployment impact. "Arial",sans-serif;

Sponsored by IBM

Energy and utility companies continue to face hard challenges as they navigate the different industry changes to provide affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy. Throughout this journey, utilities are expected to design operational workflows that are stable but innovative, build and maintain an asset and resource-intensive infrastructure that is enduring but flexible, while providing a consistent power supply to meet unpredictable demand using intermittent energy sources — all of this, in a rapidly evolving regulatory environment. Join us for this session to learn how forward-looking utilities are applying the power of AI and IoT data integration — from sensors to drones and mobile robots — as they evolve their asset maintenance and replacement strategy towards a risk-based management model that assesses the asset health and predicts failures and risk in order to extend asset lifecycles and reduce downtime and costs — all while building resiliency and sustainability into their business.

The Initiate Hub (booth #3755) will host an invite-only mixer on Monday, May 23rd, from 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm. This exclusive mixer will bring together startup companies and utility innovation managers for an informal hour of networking and connecting.

In Q3 2022, PG&E will deploy a state-of-the-art Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS). With this deployment, PG&E will replace its legacy SCADA system and FLISR application and lay the groundwork for a future outage management system replacement and enablement of other advanced applications. This presentation will review the steps PG&E took to prepare its support organization for the ADMS deployment. Activities that will be covered will include developing a converged IT/OT operating model, validating a comprehensive RACI, creating and updating job descriptions, and beginning the transition towards the future vision.