Embrace the Change
Mackinnon Lawrence is a director in the Guidehouse global Energy practice and leads Guidehouse Insights. He is responsible for overall strategy and operations, including management of a global analyst team, development of the Firm's Energy Cloud thought leadership framework, and client engagements supporting utility, oil & gas, telecom, manufacturing, IT, and consumer tech companies. His expertise covers energy transformation, business model innovation, and technology disruption.
Dan Hahn leads the Energy Providers practice within the Guidehouse global Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure segment. He advises executives on strategies to address complex operational, financial, and organizational challenges, in areas of enterprise value creation, customer engagement, new products and services, operating model design, business process improvement, organizational change and restructuring, costs takeout, performance management, digital transformation, intelligent automation, business process management, application outsourcing, and technology implementation. He has extensive business transformation experience.
Brett Feldman is a Research Director with Guidehouse Insights, leading the custom research business. With over twenty years of experience in the energy sector, Feldman focuses on creating custom research solutions for clients, going beyond traditional syndicated research data and information. Previously, he led research on distributed energy resources.
At a time when the industry is facing a historic transition to a cleaner, more mobile, increasingly distributed, and intelligent infrastructure, the global pandemic, cyberattacks, and extreme weather events have brought unprecedented levels of disruption to the U.S. power sector over the past year. The compounding impact of rapid technology, business model, operational, customer, and policy change requires recalibrating investment priorities and a more aggressive pursuit of strategic resiliency.
Guidehouse's sixth annual State and Future of Power study in partnership with PUF shows that utility executives are responding with more urgency and purpose. Our Pulse Survey of industry leaders points to an increased focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives, electrification efforts, and more aggressive integration of distributed energy. But significant work remains.
Outlined below are several areas of dynamic change that will define how the industry will emerge from the global pandemic better prepared for the decade ahead.
Engaging Remote Work, New Customer Strategies
As the U.S. workforce begins its slow return to the office, energy usage patterns are expected to return to a more typical balance between residential and business sectors with load patterns following course. Some level of permanent shift toward residential load can be expected as many in the workforce remain remote.