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Keeping the lights on

Keeping the lights on

01/10/2010 | Channel: Gas, Water, Electricity, Renewable Energy, Nuclear

Tara McGeehan talks to Libbie Hammond about why the utilities sector is an exciting place to be

With over 12 years experience in the energy and utilities sector, Tara McGeehan is ideally placed to comment on today’s energy, oil, gas and water markets. Her career began with an engineering degree, and it progressed through various incarnations, including management training and IT, until in 1996 she joined National Grid. She takes up the story: “I was working in a wholly-owned subsidiary of National Grid (ESIS) that focused on IT systems for the Electricity Pool as it was then, and I eventually became head of IT.

“In 2001 we were acquired by Logica, and I decided to take the opportunity to try some different roles. As a result, I came out of traditional line management and became a consultant, and performed quite a few assignments within utilities, both in the UK and abroad. This gave me the opportunity to move around Logica and have a go at a variety of consultancy roles.

“Around five years ago a new MD came on board, and he asked me to set up a utilities-based consultancy practice for Logica. So I started this with a team of three or four dedicated consultants and grew that to 60 people. As it got more successful I took on the telco and oil consultants as well, and merged them together as one big practice, and as a result I became consultancy director for energy utilities and telco. Earlier this year I stopped doing this role, and became director of utilities for Logica’s energy, utilities and telecoms (EUT) division.”

Through her years of consultancy work, Tara has forged strong links with directors and senior managers at many of the UK’s energy companies and is frequently asked to perform focused ‘health-checks’ on areas of their business to help identify and resolve problems.

She gave further details: “They ask me to go in and have a look at a particular business process that’s not working or an IT related issue, and I go into their office for a few days in person to see if I can spot where the problem lies. I talk to the users, the IT people, and the support staff to get a really full picture of what’s occurring. It’s enjoyable because the companies that approach me really are looking for help and so are happy to go through the details and want a fresh pair of eyes to look at their processes.”

Tara gave an example of how this might work: “One of our energy supply customers had an issue around the billing of their industrial and commercial clients. When I had a look at the problem I found a breakdown in the business processes between how they price for those customers and how they actually bill - the pricing information and the billing information didn’t match, so they weren’t making the money they thought they should have been. The solution was simple and inexpensive and we saved them a lot of money.”

In addition to her health check and problem solving duties, Tara is taking Logica’s current position as the leading provider of smart metering trials, and developing it into becoming the provider of central smart data services.

“We work on what we call the ‘head end’, which is the technology that talks to the meters,” she clarified. “We have written a system that will work in both directions – sending information to the meter and also gathering information from it. The reason why we’re leading the way is because we already have a focus on prepayment meters, and we’ve introduced quite a lot of consumerfriendly technology in this area, with a more telco-based approach that allows customers to recharge their meter using their phone, rather than the traditional methods of going to the Post Office with a card or a key.

“Starting from that basis, we then realised that our head end system didn’t really care which meter it talked to, it talked to most of them. This means that if our suppliers ask us to add another one to the system, we can do so and configure it for all different meter types. The head end also doesn’t mind which billing system or meter data management it talks to either, as we provide open standards. Our solutions genuinely sit in the middle, which makes us quite unusual as our competition’s products tend to only talk to one meter and therefore require half a dozen head end systems to talk to all the different meter types.”

Logica is involved with several trials with the big six suppliers at the moment, as well as some smaller supply companies and some international organisations. Tara believes that there will be another couple of years of trials, before a central system is developed. “We are fully anticipating that the number of meters we trial will increase radically over the next two years, but we are already adding 10,000smart meters a month into the system, so it’s quite an aggressive roll out,” she commented: “But the main issue that faces us as an industry at the moment is called ‘interoperability’. For example, if a customer takes a smart meter from Centrica, but then they change their supplier to E.On - which is their prerogative as a customer – E.On has no way of knowing from the systems in place at the moment that this particular customer has a smart meter.

“This means that meter will go back to being ‘dumb’, which of course is a waste of
money, time and resources. So the challenge to the industry is to come up with an easy way of keeping the meter smart even when the customer changes suppliers. This is a big concern to utilities companies, because they’re questioning why they are installing all these meters if they are becoming dumb again, it’s just a wasted investment.

“We are taking up the challenge with our customers to see if we can come up with an easy way, at least where Logica is involved, to keep suppliers informed of where the smart meters are. In the long run the Government will need to bring in some official processes on that because there are meters that Logica systems won’t be looking after that will need to be monitored as well.”

Tara continued: “The Government’s smart meter target is very ambitious - even considering a simple question such as where are all these meters going to come from. Additionally there is the challenge of installation – people who install gas meters have to be Corgi qualified, so they have different skills to those who install electricitymeters. It doesn’t really make sense to have two different people do two different visits, so there is a need to train people to become double skilled. That’s a huge opportunity to improve skills in the industry but it’s also an enormous challenge.

“As an industry we have struggled with a lack of direction on smart meters. We waited a long time for some information and now it’s been published we’re all reading the 700 page prospectus. We really just need to get on with it now, but I think with the change of government, it has taken much longer to get the direction we require.”

Despite the huge logistical challenge facing the implementation of millions of smart meters, Tara is in no doubt that the technology is the way forward. “I am a firm believer in smart, because if you can’t measure your consumption and understand how you use energy then you can’t do anything to improve it. I think that smart meters will encourage consumers to behave differently because they will be able to see that financially it’s a good idea.”

Tara also believes that smart metering will also herald the arrival of more tariffs, which will benefit business users as well as domestic customers. “I also think that this will be the time for consumers to start seriously thinking about generating their own energy, using technology such as domestic and small business wind turbines and solar panels,” she said. “They are coming down in price, and people should consider taking responsibility for some of their own generation. As consumers become savvier this will increase and I think will be a theme going forward.”

However, although Tara endorses wind and solar power on a microgeneration scale, she doesn’t see these as an overall panacea for the UK’s growing need for energy. “One of the best renewables is nuclear power,” she said. “We can’t get away from the fact that we need a balanced portfolio of generation and our nuclear plants are all being decommissioned over the next few years. If we don’t aggressively replace them with new nuclear sources, then we will have huge gaps in the electricity supply that can’t be filled by alternative means of renewables.

“We have to sort out the base load and go ahead with the new nuclear plans aggressively, and this means that the current government needs to embrace the strategy that has been in place and push ahead with giving planning permission and getting on with it.”

She continued: “There is also a huge concern in the UK over whether we have sufficient skills to build and run all these nuclear plants. We haven’t built new nuclear power stations in a very long time in the UK and finding the right level of skilled engineers to build them is a very real issue for us as a country and as an industry. The technology has moved on spectacularly since the last time the UK constructed a nuclear power station, so the fleet we have now is light years away from those that would be constructed, which are far safer and produce far less waste. But that means they require very different skills, and staff have to go through stringent training. Additionally, we aren’t the only country in the world looking at this - South Africa, the US, and the Nordic states have all got very big nuclear programmes, so we are competing with other parts of the world for those skills as well.

“Once we have the nuclear base established, then absolutely wind, wave and solar power can fill the peaks and troughs but that is all it will ever do, as this power is so unpredictable. If it’s a windy day we can create a lot of power, but we haven’t got the potential for storage, so there is wasted power on the days you don’t use it, which is potentially spilling on to a grid that is not able to cope with it. Then when you do need power, you can’t guarantee it’s going to be windy at 5pm in order to hit the peak demand time. Therefore, energy storage is also key, and we need our brightest people coming up with ways on how to store electricity.”

It is clear that the Government needs to make some serious decisions going forward and as Tara concluded, right now is a very exciting time to be involved in utilities: “If you think about it, as an industry we are at the forefront of some serious changes and we can actually make a difference in terms of reducing carbon and finding creative ways of keeping the lights on. It is really our time, and being able to feel and share that is where I am focused.

“I am quite passionate about the utility industry, and I am hoping that passion has made it a more significant area for Logica than it used to be. I am quite proud that I have raised its profile internally and externally – I work hard to make people aware of how exciting it is!”