Energy Service Orchestrator
Mackinnon Lawrence is a director at Navigant and leads Navigant Research, the firm’s global market research and intelligence unit.
Jan Vrins is the global Energy practice leader at Navigant.
As the power and utility industry journeys further into the energy transformation, oil and gas majors, auto manufacturers, retail aggregators, consumer technology players, and others are aggressively deploying new products and services targeting the utility customer.
At the same time, utilities' control over their business of supplying energy services is being tested, and they face greater competition precipitated by evolving customer demand, technology innovation, and changing policies and regulations focused on decarbonizing the global economy. A rapidly emerging clean, distributed, intelligent, and mobile grid means more diverse competition, but it also offers new pathways for growth.
To realize growth, the utility must be willing and able to take on new roles such as energy as a service (EaaS) provider, network orchestrator, or a combination of both. The challenge is to do so while the existing business and regulatory model is scrutinized but evolves only incrementally in the short term.