This week I'm preparing to travel to Amsterdam for the conference committee meeting for POWERGRID Europe. This preparation process requires all the traditional travel elements---the buying of mini shampoo bottles, the reading of baggie boxes to see if they're quart-sized, the finding of the passport because you just can't remember what "safe" place you hid it in last time---but the preparation for this particular trip also requires a large non-traditional element: Namely, I have to read through a million paper abstracts.
Okay, not a million. That's an exaggeration. Still, a lot.
For those of you not familiar with the industry's conference process, here's the short, summed-up version: Utilities and vendors, engineers and students submit short summaries of the papers they'd like to present and a committee of experts then wades through all those submissions and someone says "Hey, this guy's paper fits with this guy's paper" and, through this process, we build ourselves a conference.
So, this week, I'm reading through paper abstracts for POWERGRID Europe so that next week, in Amsterdam, I'll know what we're talking about when Richard from Areva T&D or Heiko from Siemens or Marco from UTInnovation pipes up with "Hey, this guy's paper fits with this guy's paper."
What I've found through this reading process is that we're all dealing with the same stuff. Or, as the Disney ride puts it: It's a small world after all.
The largest popular topics: the smart grid and renewables. The largest popular headaches: How do we get the smart grid to work just right and how do we plug in those pesky renewables, exactly?
It reminds me of the time I ran into an old friend (who works in the industry) out of the blue in a line at Heathrow airport. I'd come in from Tulsa and was heading to Milan. He'd come in from Canada and was headed to Moscow. What were the odds we'd meet each other at Heathrow?
But, we do work in the same industry, and, while we weren't headed to the same conference, we were both headed to conferences. And, with those two similarities, patterns start to establish. This pattern led us to bump into each other at an airport hub.
Patterns establish themselves in our industry, too---whether the technology is popping up in New Hampshire, the Netherlands or New Delhi. The question remains, though: What do these patterns really tell us?
Right now, I don't know. Perhaps I will have more answers when I come back from Amsterdam and know which guy's paper fits perfectly with which other guy's paper. Perhaps then the patterns will reveal a clear message, and I'll be able to tell the industry's fortune and its future.
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That's our experience too - we think that you can learn from others in the sector in other territories.
ReplyDeleteWhich is one of the reasons we talk to colleagues in the UK market where, despite different regulatory regimes and infrastructure, we see innovative approaches to the introduction of smart meter technologies. Although different regulatory structures and different network architectures lead to different solutions we also see some similarities which are always worth examining.
Rich Huntley - Vertex
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