Welcome to the new Energy Central — same great community, now with a smoother experience. To login, use your Energy Central email and reset your password.

Home
Energy Central Podcasts
Energy Central Podcasts
 · Posted in Home

Power Perspectives: GIS for smaller utilities: grid modernization is here (brought to you by SSP Innovations)

Be sure to sign into your Energy Central account (register for free here) to access this full post with the podcast recording.

In this episode, Mike Goggin, Senior Product Manager at SSP Innovations, joins the Power Perspectives to explore how advanced GIS technology is now within reach for smaller utilities. Historically reserved for larger utilities, Esri’s Utility Network has become an essential tool for modernizing grid management. Mike shares how SSP Innovations has tailored this powerful platform to meet the unique needs of cooperatives, municipalities, and mid-sized utilities.

Listen in as Mike discusses:

  • The challenges driving utilities away from legacy systems like ArcMap and geometric networks.
  • Common adoption hesitations and strategies to ease the transition to the Utility Network.
  • Real-world benefits of pre-configured systems and how customization can address individual utility needs.
  • The Utility Network’s role in tackling the energy transition, electrification, and grid resilience challenges.

For any utility professionals looking to modernize operations while keeping costs manageable, this episode provides actionable insights and guidance. Join host Jason Price and producer Matt Chester as they uncover how GIS innovation is empowering utilities of every size to thrive in a rapidly evolving energy landscape.

Prefer to Read vs. Listening? Scroll Down to Read Transcript

Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Power Perspectives: SSP Innovations

 

Key Links:

Mike Goggin's Energy Central Profile: https://energycentral.com/member/profile/mike-goggin-0/about 

SSP Innovations on Energy Central: https://energycentral.com/o/ssp

Think Differently: Why GIS and Modern Network Management are Intertwined by Mike Goggin: https://energycentral.com/o/ssp/think-differently-why-gis-and-modern-network-management-are-intertwined 

Ask a Question to Our Future Guests: Do you have a burning question for the utility executives and energy industry thought leaders that we feature each week on Power Perspectives? Leave us a message here for your chance to be featured in an upcoming episode: www.speakpipe.com/EnergyCentralPodcast 

 

TRANSCRIPT

Jason Price:

For a long time, the advanced GIS tools of the Esri Utility Network were only accessible to larger utilities due to their cost and complexity. But as grid modernization becomes crucial for even the smallest players, innovation has brought this robust GIS technology down to size, making it viable for cooperatives, municipalities, and mid-size utilities. Today we're speaking with Mike Goggin, senior product manager at SSP Innovations, who's here to walk us through how SSP created a tool to do just that, gives smaller utilities access to the full power of Esri's network management. Mike brings decades of invaluable insight into why this transition is needed now and how it can be achieved.

I'm Jason Price, coming to you from New York City, and with me as always is Matt Chester, energy central producer and community manager from Orlando, Florida. Matt GIS seemed to be a somewhat niche topic, but I take it that's no longer the case on Energy Central's platform.

 

Matt Chester:

You're 100% right there, Jason. A few years ago, we'd have a couple of authors who focused on GIS, but they were evangelists for the tech. They were making sure everybody knew about it and why the utility company should care because it was so new. But now we still have those champions of GIS, but we also have people all across the utility sector who have their hands in GIS chiming in because it's no longer about convincing people the tech is worth it, but now instead it's about updating us on the latest breakthroughs, case studies, sharing tips on what you can and should do now that GIS is here. So that convincing stage, I think it's pretty much gone, and now it's all about implementation, optimization, and building out all that extra value.

 

Jason Price:

Thanks, Matt. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank SSP Innovations, our sponsor of today's show. Now let's get started. Mike Goggin, welcome to the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

 

Mike Goggin:

Thanks, Jason. I appreciate that. Thank you for having me on the show today.

 

Jason Price:

You bet. Mike, let's start with an introduction. Your career in the utility spans more than three decades. How did your journey begin, and how did it lead you to SSP Innovations?

 

Mike Goggin:

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't think it was intentional at first, but then it became very intentional. So I've been in the industry for 32 years. The first 13 and a half years I spent at Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, I started in their drafting department. We were still using pens and paper back then, but it was before their digital transformation. But that's kind of how I started to get into mapping infrastructure within utilities, which then led to a digital transformation within Commonwealth Edison; we moved over to a GIS. I was very grateful to be part of that process in many, many, many roles, and that got me to thinking about my 13th year there, is to make this an intentional career path for me because I actually did accidentally find my passion in life, which was GIS.

So I looked around, and I ended up going to Esri for eight and a half years, working on their utilities team, and this was an extraordinary opportunity because I was able to work with hundreds of utilities across the country just to get to know them, to understand them, both commodities, electric and gas, what were their ambitions, goals, objectives, what were their pitfalls, everything they were struggling with in the organization.

That kind of was very, very related to mapping and asset management and operations and stuff like that. I was about eight and a half years there, and I just had this need to get back to hands-on working with utilities in technical space, which is where I came from, and I moved to consulting, and I've been kind of in that realm of consulting since about 2013. Till recently, this year, I was in consulting here at SSP for a couple of years, and then I moved over to product management, and now I am the senior product management of our utility network program here we have, which includes not only products but also services. So that's kind of how my career evolved over time.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah, you really know the space, and that's why we have you here. So let's dive into the conversation. So I want you to frame the challenge I mentioned in the introduction. So utilities are facing a major shift with the retirement of traditional systems like ArcMap and the geometric network. So talk to us what are the challenges this shift brings and why do you think it's essential for utilities to transition to the modern systems now available, like the Esri utility network.

 

Mike Goggin:

Sure. So the shift, and I'm going to come at it from a context of utilities that are using these, what we can probably comfortably call legacy systems of ArcMap and geometric network. So the challenge is that I'm observing in the market, one is just moving from something that they are familiar with. I mean, the technology that they're using today has been around for roughly 30 years. So whether you started 30 years ago or whether you got in somewhere in that timeline, it's been out there and being leveraged for a while. So there's that fear of change, if you will, and I think there's the level of change. Some of this is going to sound a little bit frightening, and I think this is the way people are receiving it; at the same time, it's a 100% change to move from ArcMap and geometric network into Esri's newer network management technology and software.

Everything from the data structure changes, the application that you're using, you were using ArcMap; now you're using ArcGIS Pro, a different technology and your workflows are going to change to support that technology, and as well as that data is structured. So it's a little scary, but at the same time, that feeds into why it's a challenge. The third challenge is utilities, having the resources to learn and perform something new, something of this magnitude of change. And it has been called not an upgrade; it's very important; it's a migration. It's been called a re-implementation of your GIS, and again, I'm building up this scary monster thing, but at the end of the day, it's actually all for good, but this is in the heads of the folks that we're talking to. And then there's the justification around the cost, because it's not an upgrade people are immediately thinking and going back to, "Well, when we implemented it, GIS..." I mean, I know when I implemented GIS back in the mid to upper 90s, we were talking millions and millions of dollars.

Well, between 10 and 30 million, we spent on implementing that technology; I think I was just an archive of the day, but it's a reality. So when you step back at that and then ask, "Well, why do you think it's essential for utilities to transition?" I step back out of my GIS hat and I put my utility hat on for a moment. I mean, just look at what utilities are facing right now. And I think the largest commodity, which is where the majority of my background is, is in electric. So there are so many things that are coming at the electric organization. Sometimes they're promoting them or beneficiaries of them, and sometimes it's just being pushed on them.

Things like energy transition or resiliency, or electrification. The utility needs are changing. They're changing; they need better data, better data quality, more organization around it because we also have things that are outside of the utility world that are emerging, such as AI, and the utilities are wondering how can we use AI to maybe solve some of these problems or issues that we're having. So I think it's a perfect time; such as a utility went from an OMS system to an ADMS system, there were reasons for it, right? The advanced applications was a significant portion of why they wanted to do that. Their GIS needs to follow suit on that. So it's a perfect time to look at a brand new technology so that it can support the business and the business needs that they're undergoing right now. It's changed; it's evolved. Utilities have evolved, and so has the technology; this is a great example of how GIS is evolving.

 

Jason Price:

Well, that's really good context, Mike; I really appreciate it. So let's now talk about the approach you take to your partners, particularly those small and medium-sized utilities. How do you address them? How do you approach them? Just talk to us how you basically position all this.

 

Mike Goggin:

Sure, yeah, we do it in three different ways. This is the way it's kind of rolled up. Again, think about the challenges that some of these GIS groups are having that we just talked about. So we're trying to fill those gaps. So the first thing we started doing last year very, very deliberately was one-on-one education sessions. This is where we had a consultant, such as myself or one of my colleagues, just sit down with an organization and really kind of walk through what is utility network and things that they should know, things they may not know, field questions, kind of educate as much as we possibly could. The second thing we really started to ramp up was writing pointed articles that are looking at some facet of the technology. So we're not talking about bit spikes and turning wrenches and things like that. We're more talking about business value or trying to equate the geometric network to the utility network to kind of draw some synergies there.

So articles like that to where we can, again, further the education. And the third thing that we did very deliberately was we developed a product and services bundle that we call SSP Accelerate, and this is for mid-size and small utilities. Some of the highlights on that, again, thinking about the challenges, it's a fixed fee-based offering based on a utility size. So we have buckets of sizes of utilities, and we have a flat fee to implement for those utility sizes. Part of what makes up Accelerate, or the components or elements, if you will, is we do have a pre-configured set of components. That includes a structured data model, utility or network configuration that goes around that, editing automation, and editing map, right? So you have a complete solution right there to actually manage and maintain a migration to the utility network from where you're at. We also include some data and network management extension.

It's a product that we have called Productivity, which provides tools, simplified tools, optimized tools for the editors to really kind of make them a lot more efficient than using the core out-of-the box tools. We follow that up with some workflow management and in some automation to help data flow through the organization. And we wrap that all up into this optimized implementation package. And this is the bundle. So what we are going for in this solution is to hit very specific challenges utility is facing with this the retirement of utility network and geometric network, at least the things that we can control.

Those things are like for example, budget concerns, for how long the duration of how long a project would take, and then probably more importantly is the resources and skills of your existing teams. Think of mid-sized and small utilities. The GIS teams within those organizations, they're not always very large, and they're very dedicated to what they do. So we're trying to offset those three things by providing this bundle called SSP Accelerate. What we're not covering with SSP Accelerate, the other utility challenges, we're tackling with those one-on-one education sessions and articles to really just help people understand more about the utility network as they are either starting their journey or they're in their journey and they have some questions about that.

 

Jason Price:

Mike, in our planning call, you had mentioned that there still is a degree of hesitation in the industry, and I'd like you to talk about that. I'd like you to talk about what is that hesitation and what are you doing to help your partners overcome these kinds of concerns that they may be raising with you? Because this is a major undertaking here. I hope the audience understands that. I think people in the utility industry understand the significance and importance of GIS. And a small utility or muni, or co-op making this kind of investment is a major undertaking. So talk to us about those hesitations, and what do you say to clients when they're trying to overcome that hesitation?

 

Mike Goggin:

That's a really good question, Jason, and it's actually been something, I'll call it a small group of Esri utility partners and even Esri themselves. I mean, the technology was released in 2018. ArcMap and geometric network going to be retired in 2026. So there was a pretty big gap for folks to make their plans and budgets and etc., and move over. But we have seen such a small percentage of the overall utilities, at least in the United States, make that move. I mean, Esri has done a great job. They own market share by a landslide of utilities leveraging their technology. So there's quite a few utilities that just haven't gone in that direction quite yet. I will say that it has been ramping up this year, especially as the year goes on. There's been a lot more people talking about it. I think when I sit back in my chair, Jason, and kind of think about it, I see it as like two camps.

There's that camp that maybe has done some research, but they're just struggling with the challenges, and they just don't know where to start. It's like they feel overwhelmed and a 100% different technology that seems complicated; it's going to cost a lot even if they've gone down that path. The other group is that they just really haven't even started to look at it at all. These are the organizations that don't really have the opportunity to attend conferences, which is where a majority, at least from the Esri output, from information, it really comes at a lot of those shows. I know we leverage and take advantage of those shows to kind of help and educate people as best as we can. In both cases, though, that's where we're trying to help here and do the best that we can to educate and fill those gaps as much as possible. Always the concern is the folks that aren't talking with anybody. I think that's a big gap out there.

You feel like an island, and maybe you're creating that island; you need to reach out to someone that knows and that can help, whether it's Esri, whether it's SSP; it doesn't matter. There is a third group, Jason, that I'm hoping doesn't exist, but I kind of heard some whispering, and that's the group that is thinking that Esri will change their mind about retiring ArcMap and geometric network. I think this is a real long shot. If I was a betting person, I don't know if I would put my money there. Esri has done some things in the past that might lend itself, but they've already extended the date of the retirement out already, and that technology, I mean, there's a reason why they want to retire that technology and move to this modern network management platform. It's because the utilities have taxed and overtaxed technology. They've challenged it; they have taken it beyond what its capabilities are, and that's a problem for not only Esri but the utilities that are trying to leverage that technology. So again, get involved; start educating yourselves, but that's the best thing I can say about that, Jason.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah, I think that's very helpful. We've had Esri on the show. We've heard a lot about the power of their technology. We've had other customers and utilities talk about the importance of GIS. The value proposition I've always taken away from Esri in particular is the flexibility and scalability that comes with the platform. When you bring it down to the muni and co-op market, are we losing any of those values? Can you talk about, and let's put it this way, there are going to be people listening in on this who are going to be weighing this decision in this investment; is there anything lost in the application because we're applying it in more of a discrete approach to the munis and co-ops? Can you just basically, are you getting the same product to size, or is there any of the limitations that, through the SSP innovations, that may detract or limit some of those capabilities?

 

Mike Goggin:

Yeah, especially when you're looking at the mid-tier and smaller utilities. That is a really good question. So I think there's a lot of things about the utility network that really aren't known, or maybe there's misconceptions on it. It's not a one-size-fits-all configuration. It's actually very flexible as well as, and I think the scalability of some of my colleagues at Esri, Bill or Pat, it has the potential for an incredible amount of business benefits to an organization, right? At scale, not just for managing your network and/or your data, but other things outside of that. I think the biggest gap when we start to go down market, if you will, is that one-size-fits-all, and it is and can be a very, very sophisticated application, but it doesn't necessarily have to be, and that is the approach that SSP has taken with Accelerate, right? Our goal, and I'm going to say this probably multiple times throughout this conversation, and I've probably already said it, our goal was to minimize the change that a utility is going to see.

We wanted them to be able to move into the utility network with something that looked familiar to them. Familiar, whether it was a map, whether it was the way how data was structured, and/or both of those. However, still have the same technology enablement, that flexibility and scalability of the utility network technology, so that they can take it and move it forward. So the thought is that the change won't be so radical, like a lot of people think, which means that you can migrate to the newest modern technology and to run your business, and then you can gain additional business value at your own pace. That's what SSP Accelerate has done, is it's made it familiar, but it's still very powerful, and the wrapper around it, the components, the elements and the package, and the flat fee costs are what makes it affordable for your organization to get to. So very flexible in nature and also scalable at the same time, not only for the technology but then also for the utility and the workflows and the business that surrounds it.

 

Jason Price:

All right, that's really helpful. So to make it work, you come in with a preconfigured set of tools to make it fit their cost and overall investment, time and cost. So that's good. So there's a pre-fig approach that brings it down to make it more palatable, but at the same time, every utility is different: different jurisdictions, different levels of maturity, and the technology and manpower that's running the utility; this a huge war on talent. So there's always going to be a degree of customization. So for those, again, listening in, are you saying that you can still customize it through the SSP Innovations approach, pre-configured approach? Is that what I'm hearing?

 

Mike Goggin:

You are. So we are very deliberate, and we have guardrails on our offering because... And that's how we can accomplish the flat fee for our base offering. So we tell you exactly what's in our base offering; we tell you what the data model is, the configurations are what the map looks like, the symbology, all the nuts and bolts; we tell you what that is. Now we also tell you what you're not going to get, and really it's like things like customizations or integrations, or you can't change the data model or the map. These are our guardrails that we've put on it and how we've been able to put a flat fee to it, which, by the way, has gotten a very, very good response. I think it's the first time, at least in my career, I've actually had either heard or been able to say, "Yeah, your utility is how large? Okay, well that's going to cost you this amount of money."

I think people are really wrapping their heads around that because they don't have... It's not a guessing game. When we first started this thing five years ago, even up to very recently, within the last year or so, it was this concept of a traditional approach, and that traditional approach was very expensive, and it was a long duration to accomplish it because there were so many questions we had to ask. There were so many things the client had to learn, but we wanted to pull all of that out of there, make it affordable for the down market. And again, our goal was to give them something familiar to decrease the change. And we've done that still with providing all of the functionality that this technology brings. However, to your point, it may not be exactly what they want, right?

It's going to be close. It's going to be close because when we put this together, we had not only been doing R&D on the technology since 2016, two years prior to when it was released, but we also have veterans, utility industry veterans like myself that have 30 years, 20 years, 25 years, that have also been around these older systems. They have a good sense of what people are expecting, and that's how we were able to achieve it. But at the end of the day, it is not a black box. And you can make changes to the things that you're not working with or some things that you don't like, and you can do that either during the implementation; we can add it to the scope, or you can wait until the implementation is done. You have your firm fixed price, the implementation is complete, it's not a black box, and you can make those changes.

The key is that you can do it at your own pace. There are going to be those things that you just can't live without. I'm not going to be able to live out without that integration of Milsoft, no problem. The reason we didn't include integrations with it is because every utility has so many different kinds of integration. It'd be impossible to get a flat fee for everything possible that really isn't achieving much. At the end of the day, it comes down to the utility's budget. We are providing options; we don't have to use Accelerate, but, I mean, it's very optimal to use Accelerate, especially when you know what you're getting and what you're not getting, but you can always change it. It's never a static thing.

 

Jason Price:

Yeah, that makes complete sense. I agree with what you're describing here and the need in the market, no doubt. All right, so I want to ask you a question that, you know, there's a percentage of people listening in today who may not be so familiar with the utility network and the technology itself or the significance of it. We've got a whole new generation of next-generation leaders who join the podcast to listen in and learn. So for their purposes, let's zoom out. Let's look at the big picture here. We've got the energy transition, grid resilience, and rapid electrification, all major challenges across the country with our utilities, and it's regardless of the size and jurisdiction. So how does the utility network, the Esri Utility Network, help utilities navigate these changes and enable them to remain forward-looking in their own specific strategies?

 

Mike Goggin:

Yeah, this is my favorite part because business value, there's a lot of people that think that they have to move to the utility network because geometric network and ArcMap are going to be retired. It's one of those forcing functions. Well, that business case never looks good. So what do you look at outside of that? So I've done a lot of work in this area, and I've uncovered many good business values to an organization. So I'm just going to run some down here. The first one is better data quality, and again, remember AI and analytics trying to solve that three-legged stool that you had just mentioned, Jason; data quality is super important. Your data is going to be quality in two phases. First, the migration from where you're at into the utility network is going to get cleansed because the UN has more stringent business rules on what can be what, what can be connected to what. So that's phase one.

Phase two is that those stringent rules still exist. So as your editing process moves forward, your data stain is the same, right? Or getting better than it is because you're able to surround governance processes and maybe even further automation, maybe further integration with design, things like that, that can make your data even better. The second is this new technology's ability for more robust modeling of data. So in the past, the older technology is what it is, right? It was developed a long time ago, and there were many things that you just couldn't do with it, like model the inside of a substation or a vault or a larger switchgear or switching cabinet that had a lot of details to it that you would really like to have, whether it's for your power engineering systems or for your advanced application. You can now model those within your GIS system, which is, for the first time, it's going to be an incredible benefit, I think, to those two systems that I just mentioned, power engineering and ADMS.

When you have this more robust model, you're able to put more things into GIS. You can then start consolidating some of the data sources that you are managing outside of GIS, like maybe a substation drawing, maybe it's a meter card, maybe it's a service card, maybe it's substation drawings or vault drawings, or in some cases I've seen underground, a conduit management managed in CAD packages. But now you can start bringing all of that data together to create this single source of the truth. Now that has multiple benefits to it. One that is very high on the mind is now my editors don't have to manage and maintain all these different data sources. And not to mention I have one system that I can use AI on or data analytics of that nature, or even have more robust asset management inspection processes and things like that.

So when you can model a more robust system, you start to consolidate your data; your GIS becomes a better integration platform, meaning you don't have to, your other systems, in this case, don't have to have integrations with these other additional systems that you're consolidating your data out of. Now you have one source of the truth, you have better data quality. So now you can start providing better information, maybe more timely information, to the applications and the users that need them. Another very interesting thing with the utility network, this technology, it has a different technical architecture to it, which means that your editing and analytic capabilities are no longer just able to be done on a desktop. They can now be done in mobile and in the web, as well as offline very recently from the Esri technology stack. And this is important because now you can start thinking about the opportunity to move some of your workflows, maybe editing workflows, spread them across the organization a little bit, right?

If you have an organization that's just updating joint use, why does that have to roll through your GIS department? You can provide them a web map, for example, and they can edit that data, and your system is better for it. While you have this analytics, and you have this web and mobile capabilities, you can start to also break outside of the mold, and you can start moving decisions to who and where they need to be made, right? If I am an engineer and I need to run, you know, I'm looking at phase balancing. I can go to a web page as an example, and I can run that analysis against my GIS data, my network data.

I don't have to be a GIS professional; I don't need a GIS desktop. I just have a very focused app that can give me what I'm looking for. And then also from the field. At the same time, if you're in a storm situation or you're in an event situation of some kind, being able to trace a circuit as an example, or if I'm on the gas side of the house, a gas outage situation, which is very rigorous for field personnel to do, I now have those capabilities in my hand, whether it's on my tablet, my phone, or the laptop that's in my truck. So there's a list of very good business value a utility can see by moving to this new technology stack from Esri.

 

Jason Price:

Mike, you're doing a great job giving us a real bird's-eye view of the complexity and the many dimensions of GIS. So clearly, you've been in this business for quite some time, and I want to thank you for that. We've now approached a part of the show called the lightning round, where we give you a series of questions where we get to learn a little bit more about you, the person, rather than you, the professional. And of course, we'll give you the final word, but you have to earn it. So we've got a series of questions we're going to throw at you. So Mike, are you ready?

 

Mike Goggin:

I am ready, Jason.

 

Jason Price:

All right. Question number one: What's one tool or gadget you can't live without in your day-to-day?

 

Mike Goggin:

Yeah, this was a good one that I scratched my head on. I have a boring answer. My phone, my iPhone.

 

Jason Price:

What's a hobby? You wish you had more time for?

 

Mike Goggin:

Fly fishing.

 

Jason Price:

What's the most rewarding part of your job?

 

Mike Goggin:

Solving a problem.

 

Jason Price:

We've been collecting lightning round questions from past podcast guests to ask future guests. So Brian Harrell of AVANGRID had this question for a future guest, "If you weren't a utility professional, what profession would you be doing?"

 

Mike Goggin:

I'd be a carpenter.

 

Jason Price:

Now it's your turn. What lightning round question do you want to challenge a future guest to answer? And of course, it can be topical, related to the energy field, or completely off the wall.

 

Mike Goggin:

Yeah, I thought about this one a little bit, Jason, and I'd be interested because it was something that was special to me is, "What one decision did you make that changed the direction of your career?"

 

Jason Price:

I like that. And lastly, what would you consider a sign of success when your career is all said and done?

 

Mike Goggin:

Jason, I'm a GIS evangelist. I have been and am a voice. Success for me would be being able to pass that GIS evangelist torch to someone.

 

Jason Price:

Fantastic. All right, well, I told you you'd have to earn the final word, so I'm going to hand it over to you, Mike. Thanks for navigating the lightning round and knowing that we have an audience of industry professionals, including utility CEOs and decision-makers. What's the key piece of advice you have for these professionals, and what action do you hope they take after listening in today?

 

Mike Goggin:

Thanks, Jason. This is the message I'd have for executives within the utility sector, and that is GIS is an enterprise application, which is depended on by many people and application. Please invest in its success.

 

Jason Price:

Fantastic. Thank you very much for your insight. As always, we welcome our listeners to post questions and comments and invite them to stay engaged with this conversation. And Mike, we hope and ask you to stay engaged as well to keep the conversation going. And until then, though, we just want to thank you for sharing your insight on today's episode of the podcast.

 

Mike Goggin:

Thanks, Jason. I appreciate your time today.

 

Jason Price:

As are we. So you can always reach Mike through the Energy Central platform, where we welcome your questions and comments. We also want to give a shout out of thanks to the podcast sponsors that made today's episode possible. SSP Innovations provides award-winning ArcGIS Pro solutions to electric and gas utilities, telecommunication providers, and pipeline operators worldwide. SSP Innovation solutions are designed to help customers meet their unique business challenges through a combination of deep technology expertise and unmatched familiarity with industry best practices. And once again, I'm your host, Jason Price. Plug in and stay fully charged in the discussion by hopping into the community at energycentral.com. And we'll see you next time at the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

 

About Energy Central Podcasts

Power Perspectives features conversations with thought leaders in the utility sector. At least twice monthly, we connect with an Energy Central Power Industry Network community member to discuss compelling topics that impact professionals who work in the power industry. Some podcasts may be a continuation of thought-provoking posts or discussions started in the community or with an industry leader that is interested in sharing their expertise and doing a deeper dive into hot topics or issues relevant to the industry.

Power Perspectives is the premiere podcast series from Energy Central, a Power Industry Network of Communities built specifically for professionals in the electric power industry and a place where professionals can share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Supported by leading industry organizations, our mission is to help global power industry professionals work better. Since 1995, we’ve been a trusted news and information source for professionals working in the power industry, and today our managed communities are a place for lively discussions, debates, and analysis to take place. If you’re not yet a member, visit www.EnergyCentral.com to register for free and join over 200,000 of your peers working in the power industry.

Power Perspectives is hosted by Jason Price, Community Ambassador of Energy Central. Jason is a Business Development Executive at West Monroe, working in the East Coast Energy and Utilities Group. Jason is joined in the podcast booth by the producer of the podcast, Matt Chester, who is also the Community Manager of Energy Central and energy analyst/independent consultant in energy policy, markets, and technology.  

If you want to be a guest on a future episode of Power Perspectives, let us know! We’ll be pulling guests from our community members who submit engaging content that gets our community talking, and perhaps that next guest will be you! Likewise, if you see an article submitted by a fellow Energy Central community member that you’d like to see broken down in more detail in a conversation, feel free to send us a note to nominate them.  For more information, contact us at [email protected]. Podcast interviews are free for Expert Members and professionals who work for a utility.  We have package offers available for solution providers and vendors. 

Happy listening, and stay tuned for our next episode! Like what you hear, have a suggestion for future episodes, or a question for our guest? Leave a note in the comments below.

All new episodes of the Power Perspectives will be posted to the relevant Energy Central community group, but you can also subscribe to the podcast at all the major podcast outlets, including: