We get excited about new technologies that have the capability to transform utility operations, which is easy to do because the value they can create is real. However, the irony is that these innovations are often the least important part of the effort to create that value. Real efficiencies, especially ones that can scale, are driven by people and processes. Unlocking the true value of any innovation requires an independent, vendor-agnostic strategy that cuts across technical, business, and regulatory domains.
And that’s exactly why Dash Power Partners was created.
Co-founded by Dr. Damir Novosel, who is also the CEO and a recognized pioneer in power grid reliability, Dash Power provides services and solutions for utilities, ISOs, developers, data centers, and more. The company pairs deep technical expertise with leadership from experienced executives like Chris Root, who brings over 45 years of utility sector leadership.
Dr. Novosel and Root will be bringing this expertise to DTECH Northeast in Boston this November, where they’ll lead the Strategic Alignment & Scalable Energy Solutions workshop that is designed to deliver actionable strategies rather than high-level theory. We connected with both and with Wayne Bishop, Executive Vice President of Energy at Clarion Events, for an in-depth interview to explore some of the grid modernization challenges that the energy sector is working through and how they’re specifically impacting the Northeast. A few of the highlights from the conversation are below.
Listen to the audio version of this interview:
Rethinking Traditional Utility Planning
It’s a transformation that many have talked about, but the era of steady yet stagnant growth for the electric power sector is over. Driven by AI and advanced computing needs, the energy sector is working through challenges that have compelled changes to utility strategy and planning on every level. They’re changes that are requiring utilities to fundamentally adapt how they plan, build, and maintain infrastructure.
Flexible distributed energy resources (DERs) are one of the many solutions being utilized to meet this demand, but utilizing them means a major shift with traditional Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) models. Conventional 10- to 15-year planning horizons are ill-equipped for fast-moving additions like data centers, which can be constructed in under two years.
“Planning used to look out 10 to 15 years,” said Dr. Novosel. “How can we plan that way when a data center arrives in 24 months? We have to be much faster in our planning, even though regulatory frameworks aren’t always designed for that speed. If we want to reliably serve customers, we must integrate far more effectively across transmission and distribution.”
That cross-functional integration is accelerating across utility organizations, helping to break down long-standing departmental silos. This realignment is being driven by the new reality of planning cycles, but also by the technical necessity of moving from static, seasonal planning to dynamic, short-interval modeling.
“Transmission planning used to rely on three basic studies: summer peak, winter peak, and off-peak, and that covered you for the year,” Root mentioned. “Now, the intermittency of renewables forces us to run load flow studies on an hour-by-hour basis to evaluate what happens when cloud cover suddenly drops solar generation in specific areas.”
Meanwhile, shifting regional generation profiles are forcing utilities and regulators to balance the efforts to meet this demand while maintaining reliability in a way that remains affordable to ratepayers. As Dr. Novosel noted, traditional regulatory frameworks rarely match the pace or operational realities of the market and utilities, leading to friction when deploying new physical infrastructure or attempting to maximize existing grid capacity.
Aligning economic incentives, regulatory mechanisms, and operational needs remains a critical priority, which is a challenge that’s especially apparent for utilities across the Northeast.
The Evolution of the New England Energy Landscape
New England’s power grid is an especially revealing case study in terms of how historical operating assumptions are being tested by the realities of the energy market and utility ecosystem in the present. Over the last few decades, the region has retired significant legacy baseload capacity, leaving the grid heavily dependent on constrained gas pipelines while completely reversing traditional daily power flows.
“I’ve seen five nuclear plants decommissioned in New England,” Root told Factor This. “The transmission system has expanded to connect new resources, and the last remaining coal plant shut down recently. Today, 60% of New England’s generation relies on natural gas across just four major pipelines. We’re deeply tied to gas, but pipeline capacity remains severely constrained during winter peaks.”
These shifting generation dynamics have fundamentally inverted how foundational grid assets are utilized. Assets like pumped storage hydro, originally built to absorb excess baseload nuclear generation at night and dispatch during daytime peak hours, now operate in reverse by pumping during daylight hours to absorb surplus solar generation, then discharging at night when solar output drops off. Energy delivery is as reliable as ever, but the model being used to enable resilience has, in some instances, been turned upside down.
This paradigm shift highlights the distinction between reliability and resilience, as well as how they’re evolving. While the terms are often conflated, maintaining system capacity against these industry shifts as well as new challenges with extreme weather, aging infrastructure and even human-created ones requires operational strategies that are specific to a given region, utility or team.
“Reliability is a system measure with well-defined metrics focused primarily on ‘blue sky’ days,” Dr. Novosel explained. “Resilience, by contrast, addresses ‘gray and black sky’ conditions during severe weather. As low-probability events become that much more prevalent, our regulatory constructs and investments need to adapt. We need metrics tailored to resiliency, and while those standards have to account for regional, regulatory, and operational differences, that shouldn’t stop us from establishing clear frameworks to strengthen the grid.”
According to Dr. Novosel, comprehensive grid resilience means preparing for climate impacts never previously experienced in certain regions, as well as human-caused threats that range from physical security to aging infrastructure. Overcoming them requires a defined strategy to transform raw data into decisions that can be further supported by field-ready technologies and flexible AI integration.
How utilities can best evaluate and deploy such strategies and solutions will be a core focus of their upcoming workshop at DTECH Northeast.
Solving Energy Challenges in the Northeast and Beyond
As power networks newly handle elements like bidirectional power flows and high-volume data streams from smart meters, the industry needs to develop new analytical approaches that can best deal with the opportunities and challenges of each. AI can help process 15-minute interval data across millions of customers to pinpoint localized grid issues, but what it means to do so in a given area or for a given team can vary a great deal.
Addressing these interconnected technical, financial, and regulatory challenges requires the kind of open collaboration across different organizations and entire sectors, which is something DTECH Northeast was created to do.
“We’re swimming in data, but the core challenge is how we analyze and act on it,” said Chris Root. “Emerging technology will help us solve these complex problems, but electricity remains the ultimate transportation mechanism for energy. It’s exceptionally efficient, and our top priority must be keeping it reliable.”
Navigating this complexity requires human expertise to be leveraged and utilized with these automated systems. Rather than replacing power engineering fundamentals, AI innovations can instead enhance human decision-making and free professionals to focus on higher-value work, which is a shift Dr. Novosel compared to how Excel transformed accounting for the better. However, realizing that value is a matter of expectations that need to be based on something much more fundamental than a specific tool or innovation.
“Knowledge will be the key to leveraging AI effectively,” said Dr. Novosel. “We’ll have sensors and automation everywhere, but experienced human judgment is essential to interpret that data accurately. Electricity is the primary energy driver of our future, and engineers, system operators, and field technicians will remain vital as we build and innovate an increasingly complex grid.”
Cross-industry dialogue is essential because no single organization has all the answers. Bringing diverse stakeholders together to share real-world strategies is exactly what the upcoming DTECH Northeast workshop is designed to facilitate. Featuring discussions and a peer-to-peer exchange that highlight the true power of the format and overall event, it’s set to bring people together to sort out what is both an unprecedented operational challenge as well as a unique opportunity for energy leaders.
“We’re managing a system in ways it was never originally designed to run,” Root said. “As an engineer, I’m genuinely excited about these changes because they represent incredible problems to solve. It’s why I’m looking forward to diving into these regional dynamics with attendees at DTECH Northeast.”
Learn more about the Strategic Alignment & Scalable Energy Solutions workshop or register for DTECH Northeast.