Amid rapid change, it can seem risky or difficult to be among the earlier adopters of emerging technologies or innovative practices. From resource constraints to public scrutiny, public power utilities may feel there is little room for error. Yet, in an environment where customer usage and the expectations that come with it are also changing, there is risk to utilities in not developing a foundation for understanding and deploying emerging technology.
To help public power utilities in more rapidly adopting advanced grid technologies, APPA and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with funding from the Department of Energy, partnered on an initiative to showcase ways public power utilities can pilot and speed up adoption of advanced grid technologies and other enhancements via sandboxes. The initiative includes a series of webinars and discussions across utilities with the aim of supporting public power utilities in overcoming challenges to testing and deploying advanced transmission and distribution technologies. LBNL will also provide direct technical assistance to a small number of interested utilities following the webinar series.
Gautam Kakaiya, director of grid transformation services at CPS Energy in Texas, presented on the first webinar of the series in July 2026. Kakaiya noted some of the external factors pressing the need for utilities to innovate include a shift from a grid that moves energy in one direction, from the utility to the customer, to a more bidirectional grid. He noted the grid's also changing from an analog grid to a digital grid, meaning there are more control systems, telemetry, and automation.
“We have to manage our assets better, which means more information that needs to be gathered about the assets that we have,” he said.
CPS Energy’s grid modernization efforts have centered around distribution automation, distributed resource integration, and reliability enhancements.
Peter Cappers, staff scientist and strategic advisor to the energy markets and planning department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said the pressure for utilities to stay on top of technologies is threefold: the ubiquity of customer-sited grid-edge technologies, mounting threats to reliability and resilience from storms and other events such as wildfires, and new large loads.
“There's only so long you can hold back the tide. Not only [are these threats] here, the effects are just going to get worse,” said Cappers. “All of this speaks to a need for greater visibility and control of what's happening on the grid. And to me, that's where a lot of these advanced grid technologies come in.”
Structuring the Process
When looking at its internal culture, Kakaiya noted how CPS Energy recognized that often it had been “innovating in silos” rather than in a way that brought departments and systems together coherently.
He said a siloed, unfocused approach contributes to running pilots that don’t scale or that don’t offer comprehensive solutions.
“We want to take the expertise that's sitting in disparate areas and then channel it all into a more structured process that results in a higher percentage of success, but also a much more quality output,” said Kakaiya. “Interoperability is important in managing those technologies. It is putting on a concert. You are not playing an instrument in one area alone.”
Other issues arise from not having a clearly defined scope or measurable outcomes to the pilots.
“At a broad scale, it looks like a whale. Breaking it down, creating a roadmap, can yield results. Start with what are you trying to do, then find areas of innovation that support those outcomes,” he added. “We’ve done a good job recently of creating really clear mission statements and exit parameters. Are we on target, are we veering off, etc. Having at least thought out milestones… if I’m not seeing these indicators, then it is time to walk away.”
For Kaukauna Utilities in Wisconsin, creating the opportunities for innovation began with an internal task force on emerging technologies. Dave Pahl, engineering and operations director at Kaukauna Utilities, said the task force brainstormed the variety of areas that the utility might get involved with, and then thought through what technology would be required to enable advancement.
That process led the public power utility to prioritize an upgrade to its GIS beginning in 2021. Pahl noted that Kaukauna was among the first cohort of utilities to upgrade to Esri’s utility network. The impetus for being an early adopter was not just from the potential in leveraging more of the features and capabilities of the utility’s systems, but Pahl said the timing was also right as the utility was preparing for a new wave of staff to start, which comes with staff training on its systems. The utility saw the move as an opportunity to avoid training staff twice.
The smaller scale of the utility’s system, which serves about 17,000 electric customers, also made for an ideal test bed and helped form a mutually beneficial partnership.
“We were truly the perfect pilot size for Esri,” he said. “We got a lot of support from Esri from the start, because they wanted to see this succeed as well.”
Success also involves having an internal champion and constant communication with the team.
“If you take up the mantle of trying to drive innovation, you have to be the friend of the new idea… take it around and get it to make friends with others,” said Kakaiya. “Someone needs to be the motivation pump. That’s probably 50% of the driver of success.”
“You have to continuously communicate that if this was already solved, we could just plug and play and forget it. It really wouldn't be innovation,” added Kakaiya.
Connected to Purpose
Kakaiya noted that centering innovation around the shared goals of reliability and affordability are what helps make stakeholders, including its governing council and employees, and partners, like the government, recognize the importance of exploring the technologies.
“Our purpose is service to San Antonio. When we talk about innovation, our community is our north star,” he said. “The better, more efficient our system is, that helps us manage our cost and affordability for our community.”
Pahl said that the GIS upgrade helped Kaukauna clean up its data and create a better connectivity model. That allowed for Kaukauna Utilities to have an easier SCADA upgrade, which it completed in 2025.
“That's giving us spatial awareness to allow us to pull in more telemetry from the field. As we implement smarter devices in the field, like reclosers, we can basically see what's going on at that point in our system, which is visibility that we did not have in the past.”
Updating grid technology not only supports Kaukauna’s performance and operational insight, it benefits customers, too.
“They get more reliability, better service, greater access to information,” said Pahl. “We communicate more with our customers now, utilizing our outage management system, so they're well aware of outages that could be affecting them and potential restoration times.”
A Web of Support
LBNL’s interest in working with public power utilities on advanced technologies centers around the idea of helping utilities to leverage a process that moves more quickly through the pilot phase, including clear indicators for when something can scale and justify additional time and effort.
“It's not just trying something to try something. It's ‘We want to try this to make sure that it achieves the outcomes that we want so that we can then choose to scale it up.’”
Cappers compared the process to how private competitive industries are willing to try new things and “quickly abandon the ones that don't work and more deeply pursue the ones that do seem to be working.”
Even though utilities aren’t a competitive industry, understanding how companies speed up the process effectively is the whole point. And doing that means having a better defined scope, measuring and tracking outcomes, and building in decision points for continued progress.
“Hopefully, the webinar series provides enough background to illustrate why folks in the public power sector might want to pursue these types of things,” said Cappers. “This can really achieve objectives that you, as a public power utility, are inherently interested in.”
Cappers hopes the technical assistance LBNL is offering will help the selected utilities overcome some of the staffing limitation barriers and might even help the utilities identify opportunities for financial support through grants or other mechanisms at DOE or other entities.
Kaukauna Utilities’ willingness to try new ways of working with technologies is why Pahl believes the public power utility received a Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships grant from the Department of Energy in 2025. The funding is helping the utility to explore integrating battery storage into a substation to create an uninterruptible power supply. The idea is for the battery to be able to leverage supply from three hydropower facilities to sustain power to customers in the event of long duration outages. With that comes more distribution technologies, like reclosers, to allow it to sectionalize circuits and better manage load.
“It allows us to actually switch load on and off to control the amount of load that the battery would see if there was an outage,” said Pahl. “In the event of an outage, the battery, ideally, if we're at a net zero load condition, we could run indefinitely, as long as we had water in the river.”
Having a culture that supports these endeavors starts at the top for Kaukauna Utilities.
“The commission challenges us on the leadership team to come up with these projects that are cost effective but meaningful,” shared Pahl. He said connecting the exploration of technologies with the utility’s mission helps provide a solid reason and focus for the commission, staff, and the community to get behind. Innovation is also baked into its organizational values. Pahl said the utility defines its value of continuous improvement as “innovating with intention.”
That means finding the right balance between using staff and resources to maintain existing infrastructure and improving upon it.
Part of this balance is built into the governance of public power. Pahl noted how the regular reporting to and transparency with the commission around Kaukauna’s innovation projects keeps the utility’s leadership on top of the financials and other project details.
Pahl mentioned a geothermal project for heating and cooling the utility’s offices that had to be scrapped due to significant cost increases between the proposal stage to when it would have been time to proceed.
Even with plans in hand and grant funding lined up, “the numbers didn't make sense anymore,” Pahl shared. After much discussion, the utility proceeded with a more traditional system. “Utilities have to be willing to walk away or change directions,” he said.
Another barrier to innovation, in Kakaiya’s view, is complexity, both in terms of technical knowledge and business risk. Building technical knowledge means supporting learning and sharing opportunities for staff, which CPS Energy does by partnering with local universities and interacting with groups like EPRI and state and federal agencies.
“We have a lot of knowledge transfer activities we give our engineers opportunity to be part of. We’re continuously learning from the conglomerate of utilities,” which Kakaiya said involved looking at how peer utilities have operationalized technologies or updated workflows. Kakaiya also said having a solid ecosystem of vendors that can supplement internal expertise and ideas enables innovation.
Kaukauna’s willingness to innovate gets it attention from people at other public power utilities, whom Pahl said often have questions or seek advice in pursuing similar projects or technology systems.
“That information sharing is just as important as getting the technology itself,” added Pahl. To support knowledge exchange, Kaukauna Utilities participates in industry conferences as well as R&D collaboratives including EPRI and APPA’s Demonstration of Energy and Efficiency Developments, or DEED, program.
“Like many [public power utilities], we’re all wearing multiple hats. But it's pretty cool what we can accomplish being that small and utilizing the help and the experiences of others.”
