The Tech Enabled Utility: SMUD’s CIO on the Role of Technology

While covering the AspenTech Optimize 2026 conference in Houston, I had the opportunity to speak with Suresh Kotha, Chief Information Officer for Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD), about his role as CIO for a major municipal utility, SMUD’s plans for modernizing its IT platforms, the problem of decarbonization in California, how technology can help manage wildfires and other topics. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.

Jeff Postelwait, Managing Editor, T&D World: I was wondering if maybe you could walk me through what your role is for a large municipally owned utility like SMUD and how was your job there be different than say maybe at a bigger publicly owned utility or co-op?

Suresh Kotha, CIO, SMUD: Sure. As a community owned not for profit, we are focused and aligned with serving our customers and region, prioritizing reliability, affordability, and a clean energy future. So, what's different from an investor-owned utility? We have a publicly elected seven-member board of directors that allows for local governance and the opportunity to build a direct connection to our community needs. So, as SMUD’s Chief Information Officer, I lead our digital transformation and technology strategy, making sure we have the advanced systems, AI capabilities, and tools needed to support our 2030 Zero Carbon Plan, a very ambitious carbon plan to eliminate greenhouse emissions from our power portfolio. My focus is on integrating smart grid technologies, modernizing our IT platforms, and responsibly adopting AI to enhance reliability, affordability, at the same time cybersecurity and customer experience as we deliver clean energy for our community.

So, being that we are not too large and we are not too small and we are a vertically integrated electric utility that gives us the flexibility to more quickly pilot, integrate, and scale advanced digital technologies like ADMS, Advanced Distribution Management System, or DERMS, Distributed Energy Resource Management System, and distributed intelligence, which is also called edge computing, to modernize the grid and support our zero carbon goals. So overall technology at SMUD is a strategic enabler for resiliency, cybersecurity, and customer engagement. And of course, mainly the decarbonization with an emphasis on responsible innovation that benefits our community and supports our regional growth.

JP: I would like to get more into that balance of sustainability and affordability and reliability here in a little bit. But is your department involved in SMUD's efforts to accommodate data centers and the new big load that's coming from that, taking in data centers as new customers? And if so, what work are you doing along those lines?

SK: Sure. I mean, the short and quick answer is yes, because all parts of our organization are actively involved in preparing for large new loads, including data centers, as part of our broader growth strategy for the Sacramento region. So, our approach starts with IRP, which is called integrated resource planning, where we balance affordability, reliability, and our clean energy goals while planning for new technologies and large customer projects.

We work very closely with our customers and developers early in the process because capacity is not uniform across our service area. That early coordination helps identify the right sites, clarify timelines, and
costs and ensure we can plan the necessary grid upgrades efficiently. So, we regularly invest in grid modernization and targeting infrastructure in high growth areas and plan years in advance so we can support major projects while keeping service reliable and rates among the lowest in California.

Today, all grid modernization efforts require foundational technology solutions that my team support. Especially for sectors like data centers, advanced manufacturing, or AI-related development that is neo-clouds or hyperscalers. Power infrastructure is increasingly a key site selection factor and SMUD is working to be a strong forward-looking utility partner. So, from my team's perspective, we support that work through data, forecasting grid visibility, and cybersecurity. Our role is to make sure SMUD has the digital tools and secure technology plan and platforms needed to plan for large low growth, like I talked about, whether it's hyperscalers, any data centers, or the media clouds, and operate the grid reliably and support increasingly complex customer needs.

JP: Well, maybe we could drill down a little bit further and talk about how is SMUD leveraging its IT/OT and its efforts to transition its energy portfolio and get to a decarbonization goal?

SK: Yeah, so our IT and OT systems play a crucial role in achieving our clean energy and 0 carbon goals by enabling innovative programs, supporting customer engagement, and optimizing grid operations. So, we have one of the
most ambitious goals of any large utility in the US and it is anchored on our longstanding commitment to provide safe, reliable power with rates among the lowest in California. That is our 2030 Zero Carbon Plan. The 2030 Zero Carbon Plan aims to eliminate carbon from our power portfolio by 2030 while providing economic and environmental benefits to all our communities. To deliver on an ambitious goal requires working with partners in researching, piloting, and bringing new technologies to scale with innovative technology partners.

Back in 2018, we began a partnership with OSI, or now it's called Aspen Tech, called Aspen Emerson, also part of it, to implement a platform supporting decarbonization, grid modernization, and the demands of a rapidly changing energy landscape, especially from the distributed energy resources or behind the meter distributed energy resources like EV, PV, and battery storage. Our story begins with the deployment of ADMS, Advanced Distribution Management System, back in September 2022, which included phase one of distributed energy resource management system as well.

So, combination of this, especially the introduction of the ADMS, laid the foundation for management and visibility and control of DG or the distributed generation, such as PV, rooftop solar, or large solar farms, the utility scale solar, or the EVs behind the meter and other resources and other sources.

Enabling more renewable sources on the grid directly reduces reliance on our fossil fuels. So later in October 2024, additional DERMS functionality was deployed, providing automatic DER control of SCADA DERs. When we say SCADA, that is Supervisory Control Acquisition. This is more on the utility scale, distributed energy resources in real time, as well as DER communications to communicate and to and from non-scaler DERs. That is like you might have heard of a term called virtual power plant that is an aggregation of behind the meter DERs, whether it is the smart thermostats.

And then we added later a 2030.5 functionality for DER visibility and control that is more like residential batteries that are behind the meter. And in addition we implemented an open EDR for batch dispatch of pseudo DERs like water heaters or thermostats, etc. All these are all the foundations for providing real-time visibility and control for both utility scale as well as behind the meter DERs, or distributed energy resources. This foundation set up the future ability to help prevent overloads or backfeeds, managing the congestion, and maintain grid stability.

So again, continuing on this journey with AspenTech, currently we are replacing our legacy outage management system to position our workforce with improved visibility and information to better serve our customer expectations. Specifically, AspenTech’s OMS supports additional features and functionality to provide better communication to enhance our customer experience. Also the system offers outage and emergency-based alarms triggers capability. This will give us the capability to pre-notify key internal groups, because some of our stakeholders like the field forces, the DSO operators, as well as external customers when they will be in an outage situation.

Combine this, we also implemented recently, we deployed 200,000 next generation smart meters. With this enhanced AMI integrations, the DSO operators, specifically the distribution system operators will be able to more accurately verify customer restoration and respond accordingly. So, overall, the quicker detection, response, and restoration of outages improve overall system reliability and helps with the system resiliency as well. Modernizing these OMS systems and bringing together AspenTech’s OMS with ADMS and DERMS provide a unified grid 360 and combined with AMI, the next generation AMI, it's more like a customer plus grid 360, gives that real-time visibility and control over all grid assets, including renewables and DERs. It’s at a high level and our partnership with AspenTech and their digital grid management solution provides foundational support for meeting zero carbon goals while ensuring safe, reliable, and affordable service. I can go on, I think probably I'll pause there, see if you have any further.

JP: It sounds like the technology is doing a lot. Separate but related. I was thinking that for a utility like SMUD being located in California as it is, OT probably does a lot to support wildfire mitigation. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SK: Sure, definitely. We use some advanced technologies such as LIDAR and pole-mounted sensors to identify trees. We have a very robust vegetation management program. We continuously monitor and look at the vegetation that could potentially impact power lines, helping to proactively reduce wildfire risk. We have a wildfire mitigation plan that is updated annually to incorporate any emerging technology pilots, ensuring that we stay ahead of evolving threats and leverages the latest operational tools.

Our operational technology enables real-time monitoring and rapid response to wildfire threats, including the use of data from sensors. These are coming from the field and remote monitoring to quickly identify and address hazards. So again, as I talked about, vegetation management is enhanced through technology-driven mapping and tracking, allowing smart teams to efficiently trim trees and clear brush around critical infrastructure, along our transmission lines, as well as any places that we treat them as a critical infrastructure. Reducing the fuel for the potential fires.

So again, ongoing inspection and maintenance programs, such as replacing pools and upgrading equipment, are guided by data and analytics from OT systems, ensuring that resources are focused where they are needed most to mitigate the wildfire risk.

JP: Well, it seems like I always have to get into AI and machine learning lately. So as an information officer, what are your thoughts on using AI or using machine learning to help your utility with the work that needs doing? Do you have any reservations with what kind of work you might assign to a computer?

SK: Yeah, I'll talk about the reservations in a minute, but overall, AI and machine learning presents some exciting opportunities for utilities. Again, traditional AI and ML that we use for almost 20, 30 years, definition of the AI and the ML varies, especially from a load forecasting. There are many examples that we use. AI and ML and the traditional AI/ML for quite a number of years.

But now if we talk about the generative AI, there are a lot of opportunities. And of course, like any other organization, they enable us to take a more strategic and proactive approach to grid reliability, mainly reducing the operational costs and even offer more personalized services to our customers. There are some concerns more from a cybersecurity perspective. We'll be very cognizant when we roll anything more on the OT side of the house. But coming back to the in general, by leveraging AI with data or the back office analytics, we can improve not just the grid itself, but also the experience for our employees and customers.

The ability to connect, especially with so much of a proliferation of all the sensors in the field, to connecting all those and analyzing all our enterprise data is incredibly powerful. That will help us innovate, allocate resources more smarter, and support better decision making.

As you said, AI is advancing rapidly and these potential to boost efficiency and reliability. The opportunities are huge, but it is important we use it responsibly and where it makes sense. We have established an AI governance council that's a cross-functional representation from all business units and created an enterprise-wide policy to guide the ethical and responsible use and deployment of AI. So we identified high-value use cases that align with our strategic plans to ensure AI is used where it can make the biggest impact.

So we are already, as I talked about it, we are already applying some of these technologies and coming to a physical AI, this is where like drones or robots or like autonomous vehicles. We actually have Astro, that's the name we gave to our robot dog. It uses AI and robotics to support safer, more reliable inspections of our critical infrastructure. We take safety as a number one priority for our employees. So this helps us detect potential issues early, places that are hard to reach for a field staff, which makes our operations Both safer and more effective.

Like I said earlier, while AI can automate routine tasks and analyze large data sets, skilled analysts also are
still essential. There is a human in the loop, which is important from an AI perspective. Again, this is where, how much do you want to make an autonomous or automate the entire operations? The humans, again, this is the criticality comes in to the verify results, catch errors, and make the final decisions. So human oversight remains a key part of making sure AI tools are used effectively.

Again, there are valid concerns about assigning critical or complex works fully to machines, and our goal is to use AI to amplify human intelligence or human capabilities, but not replace them. And the biggest thing, as I talked about earlier a little bit, we also prioritize cybersecurity and data privacy, data protection to safeguard our systems. And we created our own ChatGPT, what we call SmartGPT. It's a private instance of a ChatGPT within our environment.

So it's not open and we don't have the data leaving our organization and we use our data to train the models rather than using any of those public open source AI tools. Again, this all comes to that ethical and responsible use of AI. And again, responsible AI deployment means ongoing monitoring, transparency with stakeholders and policies as the technology walls. And also we are in California, so we have to be mindful of a number of regulatory compliance aspects of the AI usage as well from CCPC, California Consumer Privacy Act. So it's about making sure that these tools serve the best interests of our organization, our employees, and, of course, ultimately our customers.

JP: You mentioned use cases and identifying AI machine learning use cases. I'm curious about those. Are there any that you have identified so far that you could share with us? Or are you still going through that process?

SK: We are still going through the process in terms of the, again, some of the things we are mostly in the pilot stages, we are working on them, the deployment in the contact center, very selectively we are rolling out, but we did create a number of things internally, what we call RAG or retrieval augmented generator, are applications to help our employees, like performance manual performance management programs, someone to write their self-appraisal or to complete the appraisals for the employees.

So at the same time we are working on [Microsoft] Copilot. And the same for the business requirements, we are in the process of upgrading our SAP instance, ERP to SAP Cloud ERP (formerly S/4HANA) as part of the project, collecting all the business requirement,doing the custom code analysis. These are the types of the tools that we are working on. And as I said, like we created our own SmartGPT, like a ChatGPT instance for our employees. So, they can use these to help prepare or upload documents so that the data is not leaving outside of the organization. These are some of the use cases.

JP: Okay, well, you touched on this in passing, but there's so many factors right now that are pushing electricity demand. Population growth, housing, electric cars and electrification. You've got data centers. We're expecting a lot more electricity demand. So how does your department and OT, how can they be leveraged at this time of increased demand for electricity?

SK: Yeah, definitely. Again, as you said, we touched a little bit, this is the OT provides us with that real-time visibility into the grid status. We have a lot of distribution automation. That's where we will get it more. We have both the top-down visibility from all the tools like communication networks and the sensors at different levels of the grid, as well as we have a bottom-up view from the data coming from the AMI.

So, this enables rapid responses to shifts in demand and ensuring reliability as electrification and large loads due to the data centers, hyperscalers, neo clouds, all these AI-related loads that continue to grow. At the same time, advanced systems like ADMS, DERMS allow us to effectively integrate and coordinate these distributed resources such as rooftop solar and battery storage, helping us meet increased demand while maintaining grid stability. So really working on that edge computing or the distributed intelligence part of it. By leveraging OT alongside data analytics and forecasting, we make smarter operational decisions and plan strategic infrastructure investments and optimize resource allocation that helps support future growth and a cleaner energy transition.

JP: Okay, well, before we wrap up here, was there anything else you needed us to understand about the work that's being done at SMUD lately? Maybe some new projects, maybe some new technologies?

SK: Yeah, I think one thing I have to add, we talked about why we are working on the top-down view of the grid modernization, more on this distribution automation and ADMS, DOMS, OMS. At the same time, we, from an edge perspective, we recently deployed 200,000 next-generation smart meters. These are the AMI 2.0, the industry calls it.

These are like, you can think of them as smart phones. They enable the distributed intelligence. It not only brings the visibility of the behind the meter DERs, but at the same time, It gives the help of the looks at the upstream also and looks at the health of the transformers to see if there's any proactively we need to do any replacement of these transformers because of the increased load as well. So these new meters are reprogrammed to provide 5-minute interval data so that it gives granular data. We used to be an hourly read. Now we switched it to five-minute interval lead, which enhances visibility into customer load as well as supporting our advanced grid operations.

JP: Right. Well, I'm glad you are able to explain this to me because I'm not an expert on this, but I know that the technology potential to labor save and be more efficient is really huge right now. So, it's great to have someone who can guide us through that.

SK: Thank you. It's my pleasure.