John Gounaris with G&W Electric

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

utilities, grid, industry, power, people, Electric, impacting, conversation, solution, products, transmission, data centers, industrial, technology, change, insights, john, great, podcast, happening

00:04

Welcome to the Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go come

00:22

Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining it the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. Yes, you are bold, brave, you dare greatly you innovate. You are collaborating, and you are solving problems each and every day. Thank you very much for what you do. That's why it does Real Talk is here. It is a celebration of you. Thank you very much for what you do. All right. In the hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of John, G&W is the company. And we're going to be talking a lot about utilities, we're going to be talking about all the changes that are taking place within the utility space. And what are the challenges taking place. The pressures that are being placed on utilities. It is a it's a massive conversation chock full of great insights being delivered by John. So anyway, let's get cracking. Is good coverage. Because I'm a former transmission journeyman lineman. I always like I like all conversations that are around utilities, power generation, utilities, again, power gender, I like it all. And when I was a young pup climate towers, it was pretty straightforward, pretty simple. You'd have the power generation, you'd have the transmission lines, you'd have the substations, you'd have distribution, and so on and so forth to the end user using the power. And what we had to do, of course, is make sure and ensure that the power was high quality not fluctuating. Right. They're high quality, and reliable and safe. So it was also a very challenging job. Don't get me wrong. But it was pretty simple today, completely different scenario, completely different challenges that utilities are facing, as well as the regular regulators are also dealing with and having to wrestle with it. And it's, it's a, and it's happening and is changing rapidly. And John brings the definitely the lumber in truth and insights into what's taking place. Before we get into that conversation. I I've been asked, and I've been approached by many companies. One, how do I start a podcast, I think it's important for our marketing platform to have a podcast. It's a content creating machine. And it humanizes the content and humanizes you, which is important, which is good. Net does not bad. So the Industrial Talk podcast, or platform is specifically for that. If you have a desire to start a podcast, we need to have a conversation. Because you need to be able to have that attention to your podcast, you want to be able to amplify your message. And yeah, you can go out to the standard, you know, platforms that exist for podcasts, or you can do that which you would do that don't don't get me wrong, he would do that too. But we would highlight your podcast on Industrial Talk it is it's sort of a Spotify for industry. And that allows you to really target your market because of the platform. That's Industrial Talk. Again, if you have a podcast or desire to looking into having a podcast, just have a conversation with me, I'm here to help. The other area is that there's a lot of technology, a lot of technology that is focused on helping industry succeed. They're big, they're small. But the reality is, is that there's a lot of solutions that exist out there. And again, the realities of Industrial Talk is that the market or the listener base, and the people that are part of the ecosystem, are in industry, their decision makers, they need to hear about your solution. So put it out on and So we'll talk, talk about it. God, provide, provide avenues into using your solution, if it if it makes you if your solution makes you more efficient, opens up opportunities, create sales does a great job at marketing. And it all is geared toward helping industry succeed. Talk to me about what we need to do to put that on Industrial Talk. And I'll just market it because I'm because the reality is one Industrial Talk and I say it all the time is here for you for your success. You have to succeed. It's it. From the macro perspective, you have to succeed. It helps the country, it's that important. It helps the world. It's that important. And so that is my offer. All right. Onto the conversation. One, John was great. I met him at Distributech. Was it Distributech or PowerGen, either or I can't remember power Gen or Distributech. Let's say Distributech. Just because we need to settle on something. And I was very fortunate to be able to have the conversation, we did a technology sprint of the solutions that are being provided by GE and W Electric. And I'm telling you, man, if you're if you're in the world of utilities, it is you need to go to distribute tech, because it's just got a lot of providers of solutions. And it's it's just a cornucopia of just great. Great. It's, it's your eyes are dancing all the time, psycho Chicka Chicka den anyway, it was a great conversation, good little industrial sprint. Anyway, we're going to be talking a lot about all the pressures that have taken place, as I said, so let's get on with the conversation. Here's John. John, welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining. I hear that you had quite the journey to get back to Chicago. How are you doing today? Yeah,

07:04

I'm doing well. Scott. I'm glad it's Friday. I'm glad I'm back home. So happy to be here.

07:11

Is it cold up there?

07:14

It's a little chilly today. You know, this is like the kind of a weird time of year in Chicago. It's like it doesn't know whether it still wants to be winter weather. We're going back, you know, going into the summer. So it's kind of like some days are, are really great. Some days are just gray and kind of Yeah, yucky out there today is one of those gray kind of yucky days.

07:33

You know, you're not going to be hit by the solar eclipse. Sorry. Because apparently that's that's, that's the story to be told.

07:43

I've, you know, I was I just spent the early part of the week in Canada, and apparently it's all the rage there to kind of catch up or I don't know, it gets you're not supposed to look at it directly or something bad happens to you. But apparently Ontario is is a great area to go see the the clips and and I'm like, Well, I'm not there anymore. So I guess I'm gonna miss out on that. Oh,

08:08

you know what's interesting, I had a conversation from another event. And a lot of people were following the details of the clips. But what is what's was interesting to note is that many of these small communities where the sun was, you know, going to be fully Eclipse and it's going to go up and do whatever it needs to do. They get hammered by just a flood of people impacting their infrastructure impacting all of the food, and and then the people who live there. You know, how it takes weeks and weeks to just get back to normal after something like this? I didn't know. I just didn't know that. What a farmer. Absolutely, yeah. So hey, before we get into the conversation, and we're going to be talking a little bit about the utility industry, the changes that are taking place, and it's happening fast, whether we like it or not. And Jean W's role in help facilitating that transition. That's important. But before we get into that conversation, John, give us a little background on who you are.

09:10

Yeah, so a little bit on the personal side. been married for? Oh my god, I better make sure I not get this wrong. I'll be married.

09:25

Oh, my God.

09:27

11:34

How do you hold on to that tiger's tail, and especially in the utility space, where it's changing dramatically, and given your 20 plus years of experience within the utilities, but you have seen changes, big time changes, I would imagine, when

11:51

I first started, it was kind of a I mean, boring is probably use the term now we never would have used the term back then. But it was a it was a rather very slow to change. People that work in this industry tend to be very conservative. And the reason is, because the lights have to stay on, right. I mean, ultimately, that's what we're all working towards is the lights have to stay on. And Electricity is so central to all of our lives, because it's actually only gotten more important as, as those years have marched on that, you know, you don't want to do anything stupid, you don't want to you don't want to take any unnecessary risks, you know, the industry tends to utilize a lot of tried and true technology and change can be slow to happen. But we've also had a lot of other external impacts, really force the industry to change the way that it looks at change. And the way it goes about reacting to it and implementing new technologies, and a lot of that change has come from the realities that come with climate change. And it's kind of a multifaceted beast to kind of think about how that's impacted our industry. You know, climate change is causing more extreme weather events. And those more extreme weather events are causing, you know, a lot of the a lot of the ways that power is distributed and, and brought to your home or your business in the United States allows that the delivery of that power to be impacted by the environment, either very cold temperatures, very warm temperatures, when storms, you know, all this stuff has gotten more pronounced over the years. And reliability of Electric power in our country is has suffered as a result of that. And so you know, utilities need to respond to that in ways that tries to improve that reliability as much as possible. And that's, that's driven the need to think about these problems in new ways. In addition to that, again, as a result of climate change, there's been a lot of talk in particularly recent years about trying to green the way that Electric power is produced, you know, so just in the years that I've been involved in the industry, you know, power was primarily generated through burning of subtheme fossil fuel, whether that's coal or natural gas. And that was kind of the main way that Electric power was was produced in this country and even globally, and, you know, you're seeing a lot more pressure come in through a variety of different channels. I mean, from government regulations from just people in general wanting to see a change in this area to try and make those electrons through means that don't include burning of fossil fuels. And what we're seeing is, you know, moving away from coal, we still have a lot of natural gas and probably we'll see a lot of natural gas burned For a long time, but you're starting to see greener technologies kind of get their day, whether that be solar, whether that be wind, there's even renewed interest in nuclear in this country, you know, all these things are creating a lot of change on the Electrical grid, and the utilities simply just can't take the conservative approach that they did in the past, because the changes are impacting them at a much, much faster rate than they did in the past.

15:29

Yeah, you're touching on a couple of really important points that slow to change, that, that ability to be nimble in a ever changing market. That's just never been a term used and utilities nimble. Right, and, and quite frankly, this the structure, the actual physical structure that I see in my head, which just blows my mind, because it's changing, has always been generation, transmission, substation distribution, home, right and or business, and it's very linear. And then now we start talking about how do we how do we improve the inefficiencies in that whole structure? How do we start to measure on the distributed side? How do we get clarity into that whole thing to be able to make better decisions? I'm telling you, and you're right. Utilities need to be I don't know, nimble. It's just like, they

16:30

need to be more nimble. So I mean, one of the things that that will be a reality, whether we like it or not, is, you know, with renewables comes what we call a decentralized grid. And so, you know, you talked about kind of how the grid was designed before, where you had a central power station where the power was made, that could be a big coal plant, a big nuclear plant, natural gas generator, whatever it is, but it's, it's a large structure, and it's making, you know, power for and you're still going to have those in the future. It's not like, that's all going to go away. In fact, you kind of need you got that baseline bar. Yes, you need the baseload, right, you need to keep the grid stable. Yeah. But in addition to that, you're going to see a lot of inverter based resources. So these are your renewables in the form of solar and wind, that are being added in a much more distributed way. So it's not these big, centralized plants that are kind of out in the middle of nowhere these are going to be I mean, it could be on your, on your rooftop, it could be in your neighborhood, you know, it, they're just strewn about which is going to create these environments where you've got multiple flows of Electric power, at the distribution level. And that's going to make life quite a bit interesting for utilities to be able to control that. And the problems are maintenance technical, there's a regulatory issue, who controls access to the grid for all those distributed resources. I mean, these are questions that the industry is struggling with that our government entities are trying to help us solve it all it takes time. And you have to move one very careful step forward at a time. But when you add all these cumulative changes together, the impacts rapid, they feel very imminent, they feel very chaotic. And a lot of our utility partners are also going through a time of where a lot of people are retiring. So a lot of the knowledge base that utilities used to be able to rely upon to keep the grid going. And it was not uncommon. And I don't, I think it's still pretty common that, you know, once you got a job at a utility, you are there for a long time, and you don't have a lot of right. Well, a lot of those folks are exiting the workforce, and they're being replaced. But yeah, very smart people, younger folks, but you know, that they don't quite have the experience that a lot of the existing workers have. And that knowledge is gonna get, you know, that that gap in knowledge is is a major issue that the utilities are dealing with. I mean, one thing we got to take a step back and understand is I've heard this analogy many times, and I believe it's true. And I think it's probably worth stating here. You know, the Electric power grid is the most complicated machine mankind has ever built and developed. And right, and it's going through, you know, you talked about all the different steps of it, you know, from generation transmission substation distribution, and then you know, whether it's your home, your business at the end of it, all the steps in between. It's incredibly complicated, and you're making fundamental changes and multiple segments of that in an environment where there's, you know, fewer, fewer experienced, trained smart people to manage all that it creates a very chaotic environment for sure.

20:03

Yeah. But it's happening. How does it on a sidenote? When I was in the utility space, and they they've been talking about that, that tribal knowledge leaving forever? It's like, no way Scott's leaving. He had he knows where the, you know that yeah lashed up wherever that conductor is lashed up and it Yeah, it's it's it's a real trip and the risk is that we take it for granted, it's as if we don't know what goes into being able to deliver power to that light switch in a stable way, right? If if I came home and I flipped the switch and my TV's flickering, or my my digital clock is blinking at me, I'm upset. That's that's, that's the extent and so we have to do this right. If for clarification,

21:06

you bring up a great point. I mean, that's a testament to just how effective and how well, this industry has done its job over, you know, the past however many decades is that you don't think about it, right? I mean, as complicated and as big as this machine is that's been built the fact that it's, you know, so foundational and so reliable. And the fact that you don't even think about it is it just goes to show like how well the job has been done. This is challenging, they're going to make it much more difficult for sure.

21:31

But how do we deal with the fact that if I'm not delivering power, if I'm Joe consumer here, and I know that my lights are flickering, or my clock is blinking at me, again, I'm going to the regulators are going to be down my throat or down the utilities throats, that has to be a fundamental change in that relationship as well. Because you're asking the utilities to be changing and growing and evolving and doing what is necessary for this decentralized power grid. But then you can't come back and slap them over the head all the time when something doesn't work just right. How do we deal with that?

22:11

Yeah, well, the regulatory structures that govern how utilities are compensated for the work that they do, does need evolution, I would say on both the transmission and on the distribution side, there seems to be a lot of activity in both. You know, on the distribution side, the way that rape cases get made, and approved, probably does need some revision, just to make sure that there's a mechanism in place that allow utilities to get compensated for the improvements that they make. But also, and this is something that I think just isn't really talked about enough in this grid transformation conversation, which is the impact of the cost of Electric power. Everyone can easily understand that utilities have to invest more. And by the way, they are I mean, if you look at the capital expenditures in our, in the US utility industry over the last let's just say 10 years, you can see constantly rising budgets, but everyone needs to understand that there is someone paying for that at the end of the day. And that all Yes, exactly. I mean, that's all he's

23:22

got. He's got a beard, and he doesn't have any hair. I know that that guy's paying for it. Yeah,

23:27

well, we need to balance that with, you know, because Electric power is being is getting more foundational in our society more important in our day to day lives, not less. That, that we need to make sure that it stays affordable for people because I mean, it doesn't make sense if you make it so expensive, that you know, people can't do basic things in their lives, whether it's charging their phone, or maybe in the future, charging their vehicle or even running the air conditioner or refrigerator. I mean, these are basic things that we've allowed many of us have taken for granted over the years. So there needs to be a balance in those regulatory structures on the distribution side to kind of balance the need to upgrade the grid, but you can't do so in such a way where you make the power that the grid delivers so unaffordable, that people can't use it to its fullest extent, but the part that I have a lot of interested is is more on the transmission side. Because if you really are going to have a grid that is able to absorb a lot of inverter based resources, so your solar is in your you know, if you look at the 50 states, and, you know, we know where the wind blows regularly in our country, and we know where the sun shines. And if you look at where those areas are, it just so happens to overlap where there's not necessarily a lot of people And so if you really want to be, right, yeah, probably some correlation there. But if you really want to be efficient about this and add these, because I mean, solar and wind need to be a part of our decarbonized. Future, they have, I mean, they're good technologies, they should be incorporated into the grid. But you talked about efficiency a little bit earlier on in your intro, and I'm talking a little bit about the affordability of Electric power, I think one of the things that we can do are some reforms on the transmission side to allow those resources to be built in areas where the sun shines, and the wind blows, and then find a way to get that power that they produce to the areas where people actually live. And that requires the build out of, there's probably some new technology that needs to be built out there in the form of high voltage DC, we don't really have that here in the United States. But that technology exists. I mean, there's a fair bit of it. And China, you see some of it in Europe, too, it's a good technology to move bulk power from one part of, you know, one region of a geographic area to another long distances. But there's just some good old fashioned reform that's needed to just build out the existing high voltage AC transmission system to be able to more effectively move that Electric power from where it's generated to where people live. And it's hard to do that. These days, it takes a very long time. It's very expensive to be able to build a transmission line, and a lot of it has to do with who's paying for it. Yeah. There. And, you know, there's also a lot of regulations in place of where the lines can actually go, and all that sort of stuff. And we can debate about, you know, their usefulness or not, but not in my back. Yeah, yeah, there's, you know,

26:51

that right away, I've got to Reconstructor, I gotta expand it, but not in my backyard. It's like, well, we got to figure something out. Because the infrastructure itself, let's say, I have a transmission tower, that transmission tower has a certain load capability, right. But if you start running additional, you know, conductors on it, then you're, you're impacting the structural integrity of that. So you have to ask that question. But anyway, yeah, we're not here to solve all the problems, but it's like, I was like, wow, that's above my paygrade. I don't know what to do. Yeah.

27:30

Yeah. So I think from the government perspective, I mean, those are two areas where we need, the industry needs some assistance to set up those regulatory structures to help utilities, get the funding, they need to make the upgrades they need, make Electric power affordable, and then really be thinking on the transmission side of how can we improve the efficiency of, of where power is made, and getting it delivered to where people live, when I

27:53

was at when you were a distributor can anyway to scuttle. But at that time, we'll need three times as much generation than we have today. Three times, yeah, I can't wrap my little pea brain around that I really can't. That's, that's monumental.

28:13

It's not hard to see where it's coming from, like, you've got the electrification, again, if you're talking about decarbonization, so that's going to be the removal of, you know, natural gas in the home. So just imagine your home having a lot more Electrical, Electrical appliances to it, imagine your car being an Eevee. But that doesn't actually tell the whole story, that will be a lot of the growth. And I'm not sure what the percentage is. But that will be a lot of the growth in Electric power. But something that's become talked about a lot more in the last couple of years, and seems to be amplifying in terms of its impact on the grid, or our data centers, etc. Yes. So you know, social media has been with us now for quite a while. And there's data centers that are being built out at a rapid pace. But what we're seeing is the rise of AI and machine learning. And all of that is done in in a distributed way where you're doing that in the cloud. And the power requirements for those data centers is several times more than what a standard standard data center consumes. And I was reading an article recently, as many have in our industry about it may not be EVs that take us over the edge and, you know, uses up all of our extra generation, it actually might be these AI powered data centers that that push us over the edge. And it's a wild card, right? Because we're we're kind of at the beginning of what AI could do for our society. And no one really knows how this is going to play out. But you know, some of the projections I'm seeing I mean, in theory, we could run out of Electric power and one projection I heard was 10 years we could Let's use all available generation existing and newly built within the next 10 years just to be able to feed all these data centers. To me that sounds insane to think that that could be a reality. But yeah, a lot more Electric power is going to be needed.

30:15

So tell us a little bit about g and W you're absolutely right. I heard the same thing, these data centers, you know, and with generative AI just constantly just hammering and hammering and hammering. And and that happened like a switch. It's like, all of a sudden chat. GBT was in everybody's lingo, you know, hey, BT, I was able to do this, that the other thing? Yeah. But if and then that's it, it just that was your tipping point. That was the spark that was, but how does some an organization like G&W with all of this this fluctuation? Is this change happening within the How does? How does G&W help facilitate that this journey?

31:03

32:58

That's pretty cool, that technology was pretty cool. And I gotta tell ya, gotta give me

33:04

that's, that's been quite popular in the market. But so we're comfortable with listening, custom engineering, and we're, and we're comfortable with putting new technologies out into the market, we've been doing that for a very long time. And so that sets us up really well for what's happening right now. And so the way that that DNA kind of translates into what's going on in the grid now is, you know, you got to sit there and listen to what your customers are telling you what problems that they're having. And you need to work together on a use case that needs solving, that you can bring something to the table, that the utility can bring an opportunity to the table and work together to try and create a product that solves that. And that could be something that's completely new and different. That could be taking an existing product and just making some modifications, and away you go. So the fact that coming together with a utility partner trying to find a problem that's worth solving on the grid, and then working together to create that solution, oftentimes is a very effective way to do it. Because you've got to, you've got a real utility that's working with you on an actual problem on the grid. And, and the likelihood of being able to scale that, which is another key aspect to this is, it's one thing to be able to create a solution to a problem, you need to be able to scale it so that other utilities get to partake in that solution and be able to solve similar problems on their grid. So that's, I mean, that's tried and true for what G&W does on a day to day basis of partnering with our utilities, finding use cases where we can solve the problem and then making sure that it's made available to our other utilities, which you know, is proven to be quite a successful model for us.

34:59

Yeah, Got the, I think fundamentally, given the changes that are taking place within the utility market, there's a greater demand for insights and data. quicker, and, and being able to see that faster, to be able to respond more rapidly. And when we, when we met at Distributech, that was the thing that jumped out, it's like the ability to be able to glean information off of your, your solutions in a in a fast and accurate way.

35:33

Right. Right. Well,

35:37

this has been a great conversation, I could go on and on and on. But we're gonna have to wrap up that last point. Yeah, please.

35:43

So I mean, one of the things that is, so we make, you know, we make stuff that goes bang, bang, right? We make a lot of switchgear, we make cable accessories, we make a lot of other products, but like the bulk of the businesses, you know, stuff that opens and closes. And there's a lot of that product that's out there. And you talked about the need to be able to sense what's going on on the grid. And, you know, that is that is a way that we can help the industry is, is incorporating a lot of that intelligence into these switching products, what you need for protection, what you need for sexualization, it's the backbone and how you operate your automation system. But to be able to glean interesting insights from the grid, which is only going to become more important as the grid gets more decentralized. Yeah, inverter based resources are terrible for power quality. They're terrible for grid stability, it's why you will always have to have baseload on the grid to keep it stable. Our sensor product line incorporated with our existing switching products are ways that utilities can add that visibility to the grid in a very cost effective way. Because you're already buying the switch, you already need the switch. But you can add more intelligence into that to be able to increase your visibility of what's going on. Now the key to all of that is to make those insights actionable. And I think I think some of the areas that we're going to be spending more time as a company focusing on is how to take the insights that you get from all of this intelligence that's being installed on the grid and actually make it actionable for utilities, you

37:21

have to, you have to you have to figure that out, because it's just going to increase the demand. And back to like that baseload mindset, these, these large thermal generating units are physical, they've got spinning things, they hammered the grid in a way that creates that stability. And unlike these inverted ones that don't have that, that power, that force to maintain it, we just companies like G&W and others, I'm glad that you're out there trying to figure this out, because it's, it's happening. Whatever, you know, timetable, I can't explain, but it's happening. But I me personally, Joe consumer here, I don't want my lights to flicker. So do it. Right. Or I'm gonna, all right, I'm gonna complain along with a lot of other people complaining, you know, that's just a reality. How do they get a hold of you, John, if somebody says, I want to find out more about GE and W. Solutions, how do they get a hold of you? Yeah,

38:23

so probably the best way to get a hold of us is to go to our website, G&W Electric.com G&WEL. EC, like trick.com. That's probably the best way to do it. We're also on on Facebook, we also have a guest, it's not Twitter anymore. X feed. So these are good ways to follow.

38:46

Yeah. Twitter, X. Oh, yeah.

38:51

So those are really good ways to, to follow us and find out what's going on. But the best way to reach us is through the website, and you get all of our contact information from there. And, and, you know, we'd be very happy to engage with anyone,

39:05

are you? You're, you're out on LinkedIn, right?

39:09

We're, yes, of course. We're also on

39:12

you personally, John, out on LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah, I'll put that

39:18

act with me. And we can start a conversation that way as well.

39:21

Fantastic. John, thank you very much. This was a great conversation. For a former utility transmission lineman, me. I geek out on this stuff. I like it. I like it a lot. So thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, let's just we're gonna wrap it up. On the other side. We're gonna have all the contact information for John and G and W out on Industrial Talks. If you're not reached out, that is your call to action. We will be right back.

39:44

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network

39:54

whose name is John? G and W Electric is the company and but they are definitely the tip of the sword. They are leading the way they are, they have their fingers on the pulse of what's taking place within the utility. They are delivering solutions that definitely help solve those challenges. And I highly recommend that you sort of connect with John and find out more. They're doing a lot of great things at GE and W Electric. All right. To reiterate, you have a podcast, put it on Industrial Talk, you have technology that you want to amplify and to open up opportunities, you stick it on Industrial Talk, we have a great community, we have a great ecosystem that you need to tap into. No doubt about it. And you need to promote that on Industrial Talk or promoted on Industrial Talk. The podcast itself I'd be more than happy to help out on that. Be bold, be brave. They're greatly hanging out with John changed the world change the utility world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly so stay tuned.