DTECH Keynote Signals a New Utility Era Built on Data, Affordability and Resilience

Transmission and distribution event DTECH kicked off the bulk of the event this year in San Diego with the first keynote session on Monday evening of Feb. 2, featuring a welcome from Stephanie Kolodziej, Group Vice President, Energy, Clarion Events, and a lineup of hard-hitting, quick utility executive remarks. Itron President and CEO Tom Dietrich served as the host for Scott Crider, SDG&E president; Mike Delaney, vice president of strategy and innovation at PG&E;  and Richard Donaldson, senior vice president and chief information officer at Duke Energy.

Scott Crider framed SDG&E’s grid modernization strategy around three imperatives: safety and resilience, decarbonization, and affordability. Operating in a region with extreme wildfire risk, SDG&E is making sustained investments in grid hardening and advanced technologies to prevent catastrophic events while simultaneously preparing for rapid electrification. Today, roughly 25% of customers have rooftop solar, EV adoption is accelerating, and the utility is planning for a zero-carbon future—without losing sight of customer cost pressures.

A central theme of the keynote was data as a cultural transformation, not just a technical one. Crider emphasized that SDG&E’s biggest challenge is change management—building data literacy across the entire organization, from executives to frontline workers.

“Data technology is no longer just the domain of our IT department, or our data scientists, or somebody who can code … or make really, really pretty power BI dashboards,” he said.

To do this, SDG&E is moving beyond pilots and proofs of concept toward a company-wide AI Academy and AI Ambassador program, designed to democratize access to data and tools, encourage peer-to-peer learning, and surface innovation from the grassroots level rather than only from IT or data science teams.

Crider highlighted wildfire mitigation as a powerful example of data and AI delivering real-world impact. Following a devastating 2007 wildfire caused by utility equipment, SDG&E adopted a “never again” ethos and shifted from reactive to predictive operations. Today, the utility operates more than 225 hyper-local weather stations, using AI-enabled models to forecast conditions at the circuit level and share insights with first responders and communities. Drone programs combined with AI image analysis now inspect millions of assets for defects, while an AI-enabled camera network detects smoke, pinpoints ignition locations, and triggers rapid emergency response and fire spread simulations run nightly on a supercomputer.

Looking ahead, Crider underscored that people are the foundation of the utility of the future. SDG&E is investing heavily in training and upskilling to help employees see AI as a not as a threat, but a job enabler. The utility is giving thousands of employees access to large language models with appropriate guardrails.

At the same time, he positioned the utility sector as an increasingly attractive destination for tech-driven talent, offering both cutting-edge innovation and meaningful purpose across climate, resilience, and community impact.

“If you want to have a real purpose and a journey, whether it's tech innovation or climate, … this really is the place,” Crider said.  

PG&E Perspectives

Mike Delaney centered his keynote on affordability as the defining challenge facing customers today and positioned technology—particularly grid-edge intelligence—as a practical way to reduce both customer and utility costs at scale. “My passion is to use technology to make a meaningful impact on people's lives,” Delaney said.

Delaney highlighted a common electrification barrier: Nearly half of PG&E customers have home electrical panels of 150 A or less, making EV adoption expensive and complicated. Traditional upgrades can trigger $5,000 to $10,000 panel replacements and, in some cases, $30,000 utility-side transformer upgrades. PG&E is addressing this through AMI 2.0 and distributed intelligence, using grid-edge controls to subtly manage load in ways that are invisible to customers. The result: electrification that is faster, cheaper, and simpler, cutting potential timelines of six to12 months to next-day service while saving billions of dollars when scaled across the system.

Delaney also outlined PG&E’s open innovation model, designed to attract ideas from outside the utility. Through its annual Innovation Summit, PG&E publishes a public R&D strategy with 67 defined problem statements, inviting startups, technologists, and partners to help solve California’s toughest energy challenges. From hundreds of submissions—over 400 in the most recent cycle—PG&E applies a rigorous down-selection process, advancing only a handful of high-impact ideas to ensure focus, speed, and measurable results.

“We know that we're not going to be able to solve all of our challenges ourselves, and so we've asked the world: the innovators, the technologists, to help us solve the challenges that we face here in California. Because when we solve it here, we can solve it everywhere.”

Partnerships were another key theme. Delaney emphasized how platforms developed with partners such as Itron can evolve from single-use solutions into multi-purpose capabilities, supporting faster electrification, real-time grid awareness, quicker fault location and restoration, and even wildfire mitigation. By extending one distributed intelligence platform across multiple use cases, PG&E multiplies the value of each investment and accelerates impact for customers.

Duke Energy Going Digital

Richard Donaldson opened by grounding Duke Energy’s digital strategy in operational reality. During recent extreme load events, Duke set load records in three states yet continued to serve every customer—crediting the performance to Duke’s 26,000 employees and a grid increasingly informed by data at the edge.

“They did exactly what they do. They ‘got the mail out,’” he said. “We serve every single one of our customers.”

Donaldson traced Duke’s data journey back to the early deployment of AMI meters, originally justified as a cost-saving alternative to manual meter reads. Over time, those meters revealed a “treasure trove” of data that now feeds dozens of in-house applications, pulling intelligence from millions of connected devices across the grid. That data is used to improve both short- and long-term forecasting, enabling Duke to plan generation and delivery so power is available in the right place at the right time.

Cloud computing has been a major accelerator. Calculations that once took six weeks to run on a fraction of the system can now be completed across the entire system in roughly six hours, dramatically increasing Duke’s ability to model scenarios, plan investments, and respond to changing conditions.

Addressing the tension between innovation and the regulated utility model, Donaldson emphasized that software, data, and AI operate on a fundamentally different time and cost curve than traditional capital investments. While large infrastructure projects may span multiple election cycles, digital initiatives allow Duke to make many small experiments alongside a few larger bets, faster learning and cultural adoption. AI, he noted, is as much a cultural transformation as a technical one, and broad experimentation helps employees become comfortable generating and scaling new ideas.

Donaldson closed by outlining three non-negotiables for adopting new technology:

1. Security first—cybersecurity must be embedded before the first line of code is written.
2. Clear value and ROI—innovation must deliver measurable business outcomes, not just technical novelty.
3. Strong business-domain expertise—technology teams cannot replace operational knowledge; success requires deep collaboration with the business.

“Ten years ago, when I was out at this very conference, the face of the utility looked very different than it does now,” Donaldson said. “Our CEO likes to say we're the cool kids now.”