Powering Growth While Delivering Value to Customers

In this episode of Electric Perspectives, Hanna Grene, Microsoft’s Global Go to Market and Innovation Leader for Energy and Resources, joins EEI Chief Legal Officer Rachael Marsh. They discuss Microsoft’s Community-First AI Infrastructure initiative, how digital solutions can enhance the grid. They also explore how electric companies, technology providers, and communities can work together to ensure data center growth delivers benefits for the communities where they operate.

Following is an abbreviated transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full episode and catch up with other recent interviews, visit electricperspectives.com/podcast.

Rachel Marsh (RM): Earlier this year, Microsoft launched its community-first AI infrastructure initiative, and I attended the launch event here in DC. What prompted Microsoft to develop that framework and what community-first means in practice when it comes to AI infrastructure?

Hanna Grene (HG): Absolutely. I've spent my career in energy and so much about what I love in this space is that we're always balancing between the different goals of reliability, affordability, economic opportunity and, and the trust that we have with our communities and the value that we deliver to our communities. And so to me, the work that is happening right now in delivering more energy for AI and also more AI to unlock capabilities in energy is still at the crux of those continued opportunities and some of those continued concerns. What we know is that the AI era will require more energy infrastructure. But as I mentioned, it can also give the energy industry powerful new tools. And so what prompted our community-first AI infrastructure work is to step back and listen to our communities. I hope what you see in our 5 pillars of community-first AI infrastructure reflects what you're also hearing from your members and in their communities.

We started from a point of listening. What we've heard is that communities understand and value the benefits that digital infrastructure deliver in their backyards, specifically the ability to create jobs, the local investment that accrues values to local businesses, as well as tax benefits and tax resources in communities. But they're also asking reasonable and important questions, like: what will this mean for my electricity bill? What does it mean for local water resources? You know, how do we benefit as a community, not just from the tax base, but from this AI era that we're living through? And so it was that listening and those questions that really infused our approach to community-first AI infrastructure.

RM: What are those five pillars?

HG: We'll pay our way to ensure that data centers don't increase electricity prices, that we'll minimize our water use and replenish more water than we use. We actually have some really exciting advanced technology where we're doing much, much more closed-loop and entirely recycled data center systems. So there's been leaps and bounds of, I would say, evolution, and new capabilities in that space. Three, we'll create jobs for residents. We invest in local partnerships and do offer local training and path to skilled jobs, often working with local community colleges and trades programs. Four, we add to the local tax base, and we've seen in communities that, that we've worked with over time that this has been used to fund hospitals, schools, parks, libraries, and that's really a highly local conversation on their priorities.

And then five, this is an era where more and more AI skilling is becoming important across different sectors. And so we want to be a part of that local skilling, investing with schools, community colleges, and universities, but also offering skills training for businesses and local nonprofits. So those are our 5 pillars. And, you know, as I said, it came out of community listening, but also listening to EEI's members, because having been in this space a long time, I think of utilities as community organizations. And so we learned so much through our direct partnerships with utilities as well.

RM: I love that framing. Now I want to talk about some of your work and your forward-looking solutions that help enhance infrastructure. I understand Microsoft has collaborated with utilities to enhance grid infrastructure through something called digital twins. Could you unpack how digital twins work and how they can help deliver value to customers?

HG: Sure. And I'll take an even wider lens than just digital twins, but to try to put digital twins in a nutshell, when you think about the power grid, it is truly the world's most amazing and complex engineering feat. It’s not just the physical assets, but the geographic space that they embody, the workforce that's constantly working on them. It is a living, breathing machine. Interacting with the physics of the world around it. 

And so when we talk about digital twins, you know, the most like layman's way to think about it is how do you take the massive amount of data that's in that big engineered system and happening in the dynamic world around that system, the weather, the temperature, the humidity, you know, where there's an outage because somebody's doing work, where you have a new subdivision coming online and take that big dynamic system and reflect it in a way that is digital using all of that real-time data, but to help you do planning, to help you make decisions about where you might build future infrastructure, to help inform things like predictive maintenance, to go out and repair or fix something like a transformer before you have an outage incident. 

And so, it’s about how you take this tremendous amount of data that we throw off of our assets across every part of the value chain, and use that data to improve your decision-making with accuracy before you're in a moment of need. 

RM: So a supercharged advanced form of modeling. And it sounds like it has both real-time moment-to-moment applications and then also longer-term applications. Can this deliver cost savings and efficiency for customers?

HG: Yes, and that's just scratching the surface. I get excited about grid use cases because I'm a bit of a grid nerd and because we're dealing with a level of complexity both in what we're building, I mean the absolute behemoth scale of the capital infrastructure plans that are happening across the industry right now to build infrastructure, to improve our infrastructure, to get new generation online, that's a tremendous AI opportunity. 

The benefits that I see there are that we've done a lot of work in AI for permitting and helping take what can be a very manual and slow process to build environmental permitting documentation, and even to do the front-end engineering design work. So there's a lot of AI that can be applied to streamline permitting. One of our customers in that, Aloe Atomics, saved $80 million using AI for permitting instead of taking a traditional approach. So big cost savings as well as big, big time savings. And as I mentioned, the engineering and design work is not only about safety and accuracy, but repeatability and de-risking projects.

And then when I look into the grid itself, this system that we're building, we're building in more complexity as we go. AI's superpower is helping us manage that complexity without compromising on reliability. And so when we think about things like predictive maintenance, when we think about things like storm restoration and repair, it's about reliability. It's about workforce safety. 

There's a ton of phenomenal work that's been done in helping our folks in the field have real-time, accurate information about the systems that they're working on that improve the safety and the productivity of our workforce. You know, do you need to do two truck rolls to have the right piece of equipment at a site, or can we provide some of the backend AI insights so that the equipment order was placed at the right time to get you the right equipment to go to the site with the right information. It's money, it's time, it's safety, it's reliability, and it's keeping the lights on for our communities.

RM: Let's shift gears just a little bit. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and like a lot of parents, I think about the future workforce and what that's gonna look like. And of course, here at EEI, we think a lot about the energy workforce. How does AI change how we should think about our workforce, and particularly our workforce in energy?

HG: We have such an incredible workforce opportunity in energy right now. There are two things happening in parallel. The first is a lot of the skilled trades that we talked about. There is a tremendous opportunity for us as an industry, and we're coming together as we already are with our partners and utilities to hire more trades and to grow the skilled workforce because we need more. The retirement rates of folks rolling out of these jobs is very, very high.

We are in a large growth and build cycle as an industry, and so we do need more of a skilled workforce to jump in. We have customers that are seeing AI as an opportunity to help with that skilling and to help with that workforce growth. So you probably have a set of engineers who know everything about substation X, Y, and Z. AI can actually be a path to help more of your workforce as they come on board, skill up, learn, dive into operating manuals, access best practices.

And I want to be super clear that that's about enabling folks to come online and do skilled work faster and more safely. Nothing here is about removing a job. We need more. I always say that an energy workforce is a yes-and equation. I'm really not worried about job loss in our industry. The answer is yes, and, and so AI is a tool, I think, to helping us grow and scale up and skill up and onboard for this tremendous growth that we are all experiencing and ensure that people enter the field and enter these high-risk jobs with the resources and the safety that they need to be successful.

RM: Last question: How can electric companies, technology companies, organized labor, and communities best work together to make sure this growth moment creates real benefits for communities, families, my parents, like all of us out here in America?

HG: I want to spend one more minute on what I'm seeing in the future. And then I really want to spend some time on that community benefit because I'm personally very passionate about it. But, you know, as I think more and more about this future we're entering into, I do think AI fluency will matter. And I do think getting your hands on these tools and challenging ourselves to rethink how we use them and how they benefit my day and your day and your productivity, I think it's important. But what I've already seen firsthand is that critical thinking, data literacy, cybersecurity, and judgment are more important than ever because the human is staying and our energy employees and our energy workforce is staying at the center of all of this work. And so the value is not, you know, AI making choices for us. The value is the people in our workforce who know the system, who ask the right questions, and who apply their judgment using this very powerful tool to augment their capabilities.

And while we're in this moment of building quickly and innovating and managing an increasingly complex system and delivering at scale. We need those tools to superpower what we do. But the human judgment, the human operator is who stays at the center. And so when I think about the nervousness people might have about AI, that's clear to me. The creativity, the human judgment, the you knowing your industry, your operations, that stays at the center of our work.

It is so important that we come together to the community organizations, to the utility, to those that are building infrastructure, in that the stakeholders have a voice. And so this is what's so central to us in the community-first AI work that we've put out there. It's central to how we work with and partner with utilities. Each stakeholder holds a piece of that vision of what it's going to take to be most meaningful and most productive in their community. And so I do think it is that coming together of those with the stakes to provide that point of view. To make this a moment that is really successful for communities.

This was part of what it took to build the grid to begin with was this engagement with communities to build infrastructure. It's what it took to build our water utilities. It's what it took to build railroads. It's what it takes to build airports. And so to me, this is not fundamentally different than those large investments that power our economy every single day. But we can learn from what worked and what didn't in those different time periods. And the more that we, again, center those stakeholders in the conversation and ensure that the communities reap the upside of this tremendous investment, I think that's the real opportunity at our fingertips.