Baltimore G&E, Exelon
Anirudh Paduru is Director of Customer Strategy, Planning, and Governance at Exelon.
Neha Dave is Senior Data Scientist at Exelon’s Baltimore Gas and Electric.
Every utility has experienced it: a major storm hits, crews are mobilized, and decisions must be made quickly: where to dispatch teams, which circuits to prioritize, and how to keep customers informed. These calls are made using experience, instinct, and whatever data is available. But once the event is over, the reasoning behind those decisions often fades. The insights get buried, spread across spreadsheets, field notes, post-event reports, and conversations.
What is often missing is not data, but memory. Utilities generate enormous amounts of operational information during major events, yet much of the reasoning behind decisions on what was tried, what worked, and what failed, fades quickly once the event passes. As storms grow more frequent and grid operations become more complex, retaining what each event teaches us has become increasingly important. This loss of institutional memory becomes a resilience risk, not just an efficiency issue.
That realization is driving a proof of concept to explore what a digital memory for the grid could look like; a system designed to capture operational experience and make it usable during future events. More importantly, it reflects a broader shift in how utilities think about learning from experience, not as informal recollection or post-event documentation, but as a deliberate operational capability.