Neara
Rob Brook is General Manager-Americas at Neara.
Look out America, there is a new name in the energy and utilities industry that you need to know. Well, you may know it already if you've been hanging out down under in Australia, where this company is based.
America meet Neara. Neara explains itself as a cloud based enterprise platform making the most complex analysis, design, and application accessible at every level of the infrastructure industry.
Resiliency of critical infrastructure comes into play via use of a digital twin. To unpack the beauty of all that and Neara, PUF sat down with Neara's General Manager-Americas, Rob Brook, who is known in America, with an illustrious career here already. Take note of this discussion and the company that you will be hearing much more about.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: You're establishing Neara now in North America. It's a recognized company focused on digital twinning entire grids in other parts of the world. First, talk about what Neara has been doing with the utility industry outside the U.S.
Rob Brook: We established a U.S. presence this past summer. It started how most organizations begin, by contacting utilities and establishing relationships. While we're new to the U.S., Neara itself was formed in Australia five years ago.
Since then, our Australian team has established a really strong presence in that geography, and we're proud to identify the majority of their regional electric utilities as customers. Our Australian clients range from utilities who are attacking a specific, critical risk or business problem, to ones with enterprise agreements that are delivering on a broad range of use cases.
A good example is Endeavor Energy, who signed an enterprise agreement with us just before Christmas. They're either planning or currently using the tool in business units across their organization.
PUF: What made Neara leadership say, we need to come to North America, and how did you do that, because you got involved with them recently and you have a distinguished career in U.S. utilities.
Rob Brook: Many organizations look at success in the U.S., the North American marketplace, as a measure of success. It is a key objective for Neara because we have thousands of utilities, and they all need help mitigating operational problems.
North America is a diverse area with varying operational parameters like dry conditions on the west coast, or particularly wet conditions in the south. I'm in Seattle today and it's predicted to rain the rest of this week. All four mountain passes to the east have been closed for days because of snow. Grouped together it is a challenging environment. Addressing or delivering on those challenges means success.
PUF: You were at PG&E for many years, and you have a lot of experience in this industry. Talk about that and what attracted you to join with Neara.
Rob Brook: I've been in the utility industry for a long time, starting in Canada. In my career, I spent time in a variety of roles including with Esri as one of their utility industry managers. It's given me a chance to work with utilities around the world.
When I left Esri, it was for a dream job at Pacific Gas & Electric. I watched the job posting appear and then go unfilled for almost a year. It was for somebody to help them redesign their business specific IT infrastructure.
It was directly tied to help them address issues and deliver on mandates from their regulatory commission. To make the system safe, to make it stable, and to ensure public safety. To me it was about saving lives.
They'd had an event that destroyed infrastructure. It impacted employees and constituents, or customers' lives. This role was a way to have a real impact and I decided it was a change I wanted to make. You only get an opportunity to do something like that once.
I joined PG&E but, after a couple of years, I had put the things in motion that I went there to do, and I realized it was something I could do for other utilities.
So, I left PG&E and started to work as a consultant, which I did until about this time last year when a Neara executive and I connected through a mutual acquaintance. We started to talk about what we could do together and how it could work. This past summer, I joined full time.
Neara is a perfect opportunity to help utilities address operational and safety issues. We attack those problems, those types of high-risk issues that utilities have, and help mitigate them.
I would like to be able to say, when I'm seventy and I look in the mirror, that I've done something that has value and I know somebody's alive because of what I did in my job. That's the kind of satisfaction everybody should be able to get from their careers. It's something Neara as an organization, and me personally, have been able to come together to deliver on.
PUF: What is the fundamental concept here of digital twinning, in effect, a whole system?
Rob Brook: Digital twins are different in every industry; there are so many flavors of them. in manufacturing, in architecture, and in building information management, they talk about digital twins. Neara has their own version of the digital twin. Ours is based on providing users with an understanding of their network and used to model how it behaves in real world scenarios.
Some people believe a digital twin is the data or information about your system and its assets. To them it is a digital repository of the information about your system.
We believe it is the content and the real-world representation of what you are operating. This representation is used to answer questions about how a system will respond, like what-if scenarios, and model its relationship with the world around it.
The focus is on solving problems. From an operational perspective, we provide an understanding of their network and assets, how they work together as a system, and how they interact with their environment without actually having to be in the field.
For us, it's not just about graphics, it's about behavior. If you move a power pole, it changes a line's tension, the insulators shift, the clearance requirements related to vegetation that comes into that cylinder built by swag and sway changes. It all happens automatically with Neara. It is a virtual model that accurately reflects the real world.
Neara's digital twin is that exact finite representation of your infrastructure that allows you to run scenarios or solve problems, many of which are risks that the utility faces. Through it you answer questions like: How should you operate your system? How do you respond to an event? How do you react to a change? Where should the grid be hardened to ensure your exposure is minimized? How can weather impact you? What can you do to prevent that impact? Answers to these questions are all things that result from digital twinning.
PUF: What's the need in the North American industry? Characterize it.
Rob Brook: If you're a utility, you have problems associated with weather, field equipment, grid stability, providing a reliable service etcetera.
There are all of these issues and risks a utility faces. If you look on the west coast, every utility probably has the risk of fire as one of their top risks. It's like thinking about retirement. Do people need to retire or not retire? My point is every person needs a plan for retirement. The same applies for utilities — they have their list of risks, and whether those risks will actually happen or not is unknown, but they still have to plan for them.
PUF: What do you want to show people and how do you want to make a name for yourself?
Rob Brook: The model we use with our customers is to meet and talk about the challenges they are facing. While most utilities share similar goals, they each face a unique set of issues.
Geography can define fire or weather threats, resiliency can depend on their historic investments, how they've operated in the past, and what they have as existing programs etcetera. Everybody has something that's a critical challenge. That is what we want to address
Our approach to identify a critical problem and use our knowledge and platforms' functionality to prove out our abilities. That works well for North American organizations. It's a sort of a prove it or lose it mentality. Test us out on a small scale to prove our value and we go on from there.
Essentially, we define a pilot project and once we have been successful, we systematically work through other challenges. We continue to prove what we can do to solve their problems. Success only happens if we continue to demonstrate how we address their risk and safety issues.
PUF: It sounds like you're a problem solver with some good tools in your toolbox.
Rob Brook: That's a good summary of us. We are rethinking how to solve long-standing problems and using disruptive technology to provide new results.
Our approach includes AI and a novel engineering-based infrastructure model to increase analytical speed, remove historic error, and approach scale-based problems that couldn't be efficiently tackled in the past. We have been successful so far and aim to deliver solutions to anyone we work with.
PUF: A year from now in the beginning of 2023, where do you think you'll be on this?
Rob Brook: I'd like to say that we've had a chance to work with some of the larger tier one organizations and help them mitigate an issue. I'm realistic about what we can accomplish and the timeframe for it.
It takes time to be able to work through challenges, but those big organizations have some substantial problems. I'd like to be able to help them with their biggest challenge.
If we can say we've taken a handful of them and we've been able to prove our abilities, then I'd say we've been successful.
