Matt Burton with Siemens

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Siemens, grid software, distributed energy resources, power generation, transmission, distribution planning, data management, change management, regulatory environment, load growth, power conditioning, renewable energy, utility challenges, Industrial Talk podcast.

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Scott. 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 all right

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once again. Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals such as yourself. You're bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems each and every day. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk. We are also brought to you by those wonderful people at Siemens, Siemens smart infrastructure and grid software. Go out to siemens.com and find out more. They have their hands in pretty much everything that you can even imagine, and then some. So go out to siemens.com find out more. You will not be disappointed. We are broadcasting from DistribuTech. We are in Dallas, Texas, and it is a, it's a massive event, massive. It's just, you have no idea, and it's, it's a great market to be involved. So if you're in the world of utilities, transmissions, power generation, and all of the stuff that's in between, you need to be at this event. So put this on your calendar for next year if you're not here. All right, in the hot seat. Matt Burton, he is with Siemens. Let's get this. Reckon.

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How you doing? Doing great. How are you doing? I

01:31

can't complain as I fade this out. I can't I'm so glad that you made it. Did you get winded? Come on over here. You did a little bit. I was jogging like that's a good like, that's a good mile

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long or something, end to end.

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Yeah, absolutely, you had that lactic acid build up in your legs. Went there. He was like, Oh, now I need a gator to get my cardio in. Yeah, it got your steps in. Definitely, whatever that looks like. So for the listeners out there, Matt, give us a little 411 on who you are.

02:01

Yeah, absolutely. Matt Burton, so I'm the VP of software sales for US and Mexico grid software at Siemens, so working on everything you know Sabine. I do

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know Sabine, yeah, she's over there. She is over there. Sorry, I ran into her. Yeah, very good. Gotta get her on this. Already did that a couple

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of years. She's like, Stu I have to get back down. Yeah. She's busy,

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very busy, yeah, but yeah, working on everything from transmission, distribution planning, meter data management and quite a bit of Der analytics, and how do we connect all these different areas are, what's that acronym? Oh, distributed energy resources, yeah, yeah, definitely. Acronym heavy in this industry,

02:39

because, the words are long and multi syllable exactly gets a little exhausting. So with that said, Talk to us a little bit about that grid software. Here's how I lay it out. Me being a former transmission lineman, I'm very linear in my thinking. I don't see it was always generation, transmission, substation, distribution, another substation, and then down to the end user. And from a system operators perspective, that was pretty easy to sort of manage, relative important but a little bit easier than what we're looking at today. Give us a little background on what's going on.

03:24

Yeah, that's a very great point, and you'll be pleased to know that really, everybody's thinking about how to, how to make that less linear, little more non linear, right? Because, you know, traditionally, when you had the centralized generation resources, radio, big power plant out somewhere, big transmission lines carrying it to a city. So everything was built up for over a century. All worked great, right? So with the D, E, R is distributed energy resources. You know, this is what a lot of folks are have been talking about in the industry, but now we're starting to see the effects, where, with that distribution, you're starting to see much more crossover in the impacts between the centralized generation, the transmission, the distribution, where it used to be linear impacts. Now you can have power flowing from the distribution back up to the transmission. It's crazy.

04:16

And again, it's way above my pay grade. I can't it's hard for me to that is a technology solution and and being able to deploy the technology in such a way that makes sense, because me as a consumer, right? I don't want my I want to go home and flip it on and everything's fine, because I don't want to be thinking about it. That's just sort of the game. And now we're looking at it from the perspective of, well, we have to do X, Y, Z, and of course, I got a car over here. I got this distributed, whatever solution over here, and I'm a system operator. Take us a little through that.

04:56

Yeah, I think that's probably the most challenging part. And. So you mentioned, you know, technology is what we need to deploy to make that happen past it. Yeah, we definitely have to do that, actually, for an important reason. I'll come back to but even more than that, it's the people in the processes that have to change along with that, I think that's, that's one of the most interesting pieces, is with all that technology we deploy, how are people using that to make those decisions and work across boundaries at these large, you know, organizations that traditionally haven't had to so you've

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got to change management component there that that's significant, and I would imagine you're getting some that's not how we used to do it, and that's not there might be some pushback associated with it, but the reality is, it is a huge change management. How do you, how do you take, how do you in a dynamic environment, like, like, what we're talking about here, it's frothy out there, baby. It's, it's, it's amazing. With that said, how do you, how do you take companies through that change management when it's always changing? Yeah,

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it's a great question, and that's why you know, as as grid software, we do have a big consulting practice as part of what we do, right? Because we need to bring experts, not only for the software integration piece, and how do you actually deploy these technologies, but also the power systems expertise and the engineering knowledge that you need to leverage together, because those are traditionally very different skill sets, and so when you bring them together, it's very powerful for enacting this change with utilities and system operators.

06:31

How do you also work in the regulatory environment? So you have the typical investor owned utility, I've got a rate case. I'm getting a rate of return. I deployed this type of capital, and on that capital, I get this and then, of course, as a rate payer, shall I say customer? I'm not sure if I really like the fact that I have to spend more?

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07:57

I see that this is a train that has left the station. It's happening, whether, whether we like it or not, it's going to happen. There's tremendous inefficiencies that exist today in just your typical structure. Two questions driving inefficiency, how do we get that? Because, because that's important. And then two are the regulatory agencies that nimble to be able to keep up, because this train is happening. Yeah,

08:27

that's a really good question. Okay, so I think on driving efficiency, driving inefficiencies out of organizations, or however we want to phrase it, I think a lot of value is going to be driven through the data management aspect of things. And that might just be a little myopic from what I'm working on these days, but you know, a lot of the utilities we talk to, data lives in a million different places, and being able to centralize how everyone is managing managing that data. Because right now, you might have 10 teams of people that, oh, hey, something changed in the field. Let's all manually update this on our end. Or if you could make that change in one place and spread that across the organization, you're going to drive a lot more efficiency, and you're going to allow for those engineers and those experts that you have to focus on higher value problems and some of that kind of just wrote day to day to work

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the and I appreciate that it's not going to happen overnight, but when you start talking about data centers, and you're talking about these large load blocks of power consumption, it just seems like it's, it's, it's a good time To be a part of the power industry, but it is also a very because me as a consumer, and many, I mean, it could be a manufacturer. I don't care. I need that power, and I need to have it clean, and I don't want to deal with that and and if, if we don't get this right, we don't have. Many bites at the apple to say, but that's okay, sorry about that. Let's do it another way, that type of thing. Yes, the consumer will squawk.

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Yeah, that is a good point. And yeah, sorry, you had mentioned on that other question part of the speed component. So I think like NERC and FERC and and, you know, ERCOT, they're all moving much more quickly than they probably have in the past, with a lot of this uncomfortable for them, yeah, but, I mean, they're doing really a fantastic job at it, you know, is being part of some of those discussions on how they're making those decisions, those stakeholder groups are working pretty quickly, and they have a lot of experts in the room to help help do that. And also, to your point, there, on the load growth piece, it is daunting, and everyone's that's really the big buzz right now is, how do we solve for that? I think the one kind of silver lining of all that might be with that load growth does come more ability to deploy more software, more hardware, more capital to solve those problems where it won't have such a large impact on the rate base because of those new loads

11:03

see, and I look at it this way, like these LED lights, there's multiple little lights, and I see that as sort of venturing into multiple generators that can can ensure, if one goes out, is it's Not the end of the world. Unlike the big monster, you know, asset, it's so you have smaller ones that you can dispatch. You've got the technology. And it just seems like that's, that's where we're going. And I think that that's a, that's a interesting scenario,

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it really is. And actually, what? What's even more, that it's one of my favorite topics, because that is a good thesis. But then the downside is a lot of those big generators, big rotating mass, so you start getting this as it gets a little more engineering heavy. But the inertia the grid, you

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have to, then you have to have that to stabilize that grid, that physical stability, exactly.

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But I you know, there are a lot of there's a lot of headway being made in just power conditioning devices. And also, you know, through Siemens grid software, some of the analytics you need to do on some of those harmonics and higher frequency analyzes you need to do to keep the grid stable. Here's

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a I digress. The question I have is, is a utility comes to you says, Hey, we like what you're saying, and we want, we want to know more, and we want to be able to partner with you and be able to start deploying a solution. We see the need. We see the growth, whatever. How quickly can you turn this stuff around?

12:45

Oh, a Siemens grid software. Yeah, really? Oh, yeah. Well, it definitely depends on the solution. But that's that's that can be relatively quick, because we do have the in house expertise to help scope that out. So, you know, it could be something as simple as, here's a software license, and you're off and running the next day. It can be a more complex project where we help you understand, okay, what data you're working with today, and turn it into something that is a combination of the software deployment and also the change management, so that it's something the whole utility organization can get behind.

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Is this, you know, because of the conversation we're having at DistribuTech. It's pretty exciting. It's it's dazzling. It's a it's a bright, shiny object, which is very cool. Are other parts of the world having a similar conversation?

13:32

That is a great question. So I'm pretty US centric. But yes, I mean the the distributed energy proliferation is, happening everywhere. Also renewables, even if it's large utility scale renewables, it's still inverter based resources, so you still have those inertia problems. So do Yeah, Europe is certainly experiencing it. I mean, Australia, certainly a lot of Asia is experiencing it. There's other regions in the world, maybe they're a little further behind, but it's only going to you know, the main factor is that now, you know, Europe, Australia, United States, has regulatory helped drive some of the adoption, but now the economics have flipped such that it just makes more economic sense to even skip some steps that we took, and just you're going right to solar, you're going right to wind as a better economic decision, so they're going to start facing those problems much sooner than we had to

14:24

you mentioned that part of your service territory is Mexico. What challenges are they dealing with?

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That's a great question. So in Mexico, Central America, generally, different pockets do have a lot of renewable penetration, maybe some hydro in particular, overall, a lot of the issues look relatively similar. It's aging infrastructure. It's how to manage and orchestrate all of these assets in just a better way. And you know, they're only a few years out of having that kind of distributed energy load growth and generation growth. We've experienced over the past probably 10 years

15:01

or so. I would imagine it's regional too, in a sense that there's a lot of border, border type of businesses that are shaping that drive to more reliable,

15:15

reliable power, yeah, just mention that on the reliable power side, I mean, that's huge, huge. Yeah, especially data centers. A lot of these big loads are super sensitive, like you talk, you know, chip manufacturing, the data centers, yeah, you have the slightest little fluctuation in the frequency. And it's, you know, you're gonna utility. They're getting a phone call, yeah,

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and, and, and that's, that's massive cap x, oh, yeah, yeah, they're not messing around. So with all that said, you need to put your future hat on. Where do you see it going? Based off your conversation, where do we see it going? Oh, wow. The whole industry

15:50

generally, yeah, just Yeah. I think we're going to see a lot of this load growth. I don't know, personal opinion if we're going to meet such high projections we've been seeing. You never know how bubbly things can be, but we're going to see significant load growth that we haven't seen in a long time. We're going to see a lot more efficiency driven through system operators and utilities are embracing a lot of this technology to make this happen. We're going to see the deployment, especially in kind of R and D space, of really interesting new hardware on power conditioning type devices. I think we're going to see more experimentation on on new generation resources, maybe even like Duke. I don't know enough about it, but I've been asking about it on the small modular reactors, what's

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going to be? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Again, way above my pay grade, but I do like it. Yeah.

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I mean, they're putting a lot of effort into it. It's gonna happen. I mean, you see some of these data center folks inking deals with nuke plants that were considering retirement, and, you know, even behind the meter type data centers paired, I think so, all signs point to a positive outcome there. And I think it's just going to be what's the magnitude of that load growth and change?

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Yeah, I agree, Matt, how do people get a hold of you? Oh,

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you can find me on LinkedIn. Matt Burton at Siemens, or matt.burton@siemens.com

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you were great guy. Thank you, sir. Thank you for finding me. Thank you for stopping at that Gatorade stand and building up your electrolytes. Appreciate it. Yeah, all right. We're broadcasting from DistribuTech. We're in Dallas, Texas. And if you are in the power business, or thinking about getting into the utility or transmission or any of those you need to be at, you need to put this one on your calendar. It is an absolute barn burner. You get to see some great, great technology, and you get to feed people like Matt. That's so great. We're gonna have all the contact information for Matt out on Industrial Talk. So stay tuned. We will be right back. You're

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listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. You

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DistribuTech if you're in the world of of utilities, transmission, substations, power, this is an event for you. It was chock full of incredible leaders like Matt Burton grid software with Siemens. It's an exciting time. I have got to tell you, it's a wonderful event, and it's a market that you need to be involved in big time. It is absolutely wonderful. Reach out to Matt and find out more. There's a lot going on. It's frothy. All right, Industrial Talk is a marketing company. It is dedicated to your success. It amplifies your message and hopefully brings in more opportunities. That's what it's all about. Industrial Talk. Go out to Industrial Talk, find out more. That's what we're all about. We're going to be putting out an e book soon, so be on the lookout. Be bold. Be brave. Darren greatly hang out with Matt. Change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. Stay tuned. You.