Grid modernization sits at the intersection of operational reliability, deep technology, regulatory complexity, and customer impact. Almost everyone working in the space sees it from one angle, the utility operator's, the vendor's, the integrator's, or the consultant's. Very few people see it from all five.
Over the past 33+ years, I've made deliberate moves to build that full 360° view. Each transition was a chosen step toward a specific capability I knew I didn't yet have. I've now sat in all five chairs.
Austin Energy
-
Oct 1993 - Nov 2015 · 22 years
I started in the Austin Energy control center long before “smart grid” or “grid modernization” were terms, when grid operations were 100% manual: calculator, pencil, paper logs, and operator judgment. That's why I know what's under the hood in the operating systems and the operating practices, not just what the dashboards show. Over 22 years, I lived through and helped implement every major operational technology evolution: EMS, OMS, DMS, ADMS, DERMS, distribution SCADA, GIS, AMI, FLISR. From fully manual operations then to leading the AI evolution now.
I built and ran the Blackstart restoration program from the ground up, earned the NERC system operator certification on the reliability credential and carried it through those years, supervised real-time T&D operations, and led the integration of advanced grid technologies across the control room.
The control room years, in full
Austin Energy is municipal, so the system I ran is a matter of public record. In my years there it was 437 square miles, just under 500,000 meters and close to a million people, 620 miles of transmission at 69, 138, and 345 kV, 11,400 miles of distribution, 74 substations, and more than 3,000 MW of generation with Decker as the contracted blackstart resource. Interconnections to LCRA and CenterPoint. All time peaks of 2,714 MW in August 2011 and 2,195 MW in February 2011. The utility publishes the current numbers, now 633.5 miles of transmission, 12,337 miles of distribution, 81 substations, and 575,087 customers.
The control systems came in that order too: Harris SCADA from 1993, an in-house trouble call system, ABB Ranger SCADA and EMS from 2003, GE PowerOn for outage management, then the Telvent and Schneider ADMS. I was the operations subject matter expert on those implementations, which meant requirements, factory and site acceptance testing, operator training, go live, and the weeks after go live when it either works on shift or it does not. In February 2011, during the ERCOT-wide rotating outages, I ran Austin Energy's part of the load shed and figured the blocks by hand, because the event was bigger than anything we were set up to calculate.
I worked every major event on that system between 1993 and November 2015: the ice storms of 1998, 2003, and 2007, the Halloween flood of 2013 and both 2015 floods, tornadoes and severe storms, the ERCOT rotating outage events of 2006 and 2011, and the 2011 heat emergency that set our all time peak. ERCOT blackstart training and multi-utility restoration exercises ran every year alongside it. I also spent those years coordinating with independent power producers wired into our system, including the University of Texas campus cogeneration microgrid at 69 kV and three waste-to-energy plants on automatically switched overhead primary. We were switching around embedded generation and islanded campus load long before anyone called it DER.
Austin Energy had a 23-year vested retirement system available at any age, which gave me a deliberate runway to fully evolve with the industry. Those weren't 23 passive years, they were 23 years of deep, hands-on experience implementing and operating every major grid platform on the market as the industry transformed. By the end, I could speak credibly about how each platform actually performed in production, where the gaps were, and what utility operators really needed from the next generation of technology. That depth is what made the next chapter possible.
Operator-grade credibility, the ability to speak the truth about what grid modernization technology actually does, and doesn't do, in real-time operations.
Schneider Electric
-
Jan 2016 - Apr 2022 · 6 years
I was recruited into Schneider Electric specifically because of that operational depth. Their ADMS and DERMS platforms were being designed by people who had never run one and sold to people who had to. I had taken delivery of that platform as a customer, modeled the downtown secondary mesh network inside it, and then operated it on shift for years. Those 22 years are set out in full here, and they are the reason the next six years looked the way they did.
I led the global SME team and worked across product development, R&D, pre-sales, deployments, and integrations. I set new sales records every year, deployed Schneider ADMS at 14 or more utilities across North America and Australia, and pioneered the cloud-based virtual server environment that became the global default for ADMS demonstrations.
My operator background fed product enhancements directly back into the engineering roadmap, including the ADMS and DERMS hybrid architecture at Arizona Public Service, and the wildfire mitigation operational capability built into ADMS for Pacific Gas & Electric, which moved wildfire risk out of planning and into real-time control room workflow. That is the loop that matters: I took what I learned running the system and put it into the systems everyone else runs.
The vendor lens, how operational technology gets developed, enhanced, packaged, sold, deployed, and consulted on, plus the discipline of becoming an industry-recognized voice for a platform.
Cognizant Technology Solutions
-
Apr 2022 - Apr 2024 · 2 years
At Cognizant I built and directed the Smart Utilities Digital Grid Solutions practice. I defined offerings, led a team of senior SMEs, supported RFPs and proposals, coordinated with platform providers and hyperscalers, and oversaw enterprise programs.
I worked on major engagements including PSEG Long Island's DER SCADA migration and OSI DERMS implementation, and Duke Energy's GE OMS support and DMS migration.
Enterprise systems integration, how grid modernization gets executed at scale across multi-vendor, multi-platform, multi-year programs at the largest utilities.
Qualus Technology Solutions
-
Apr 2024 - Jan 2025 · ~10 months
At Qualus I moved into a strategic consulting and advisory-focused role as Senior Principal for Grid Management Solutions. I worked directly with utilities on ADMS strategy, AMI 2.0 integration, modernization roadmaps, and operational assessments.
I led the Hydro One operations change management consulting engagement and the ADMS upgrade assessment work. The role gave me the consulting depth I wanted to add on top of the integration experience, defining where utilities needed to go, not just how to implement.
Senior consulting and advisory craft, how to lead strategy engagements with utility leadership teams and translate operational realities into modernization roadmaps.
Wipro
-
Jan 2025 - Jun 5, 2026
Wipro recruited me as Partner for Grid Modernization & Energy Transition Consulting in North America. The role was the integration of everything built so far, business development, growth strategy, multi-million-dollar engagement leadership, executive advisory, platform direction, and practice building.
I architected GridVISION (Wipro's flagship system-of-systems platform), Suite 16 (the 16-domain utility modernization framework), and MC-LLI (the mission-critical large-load infrastructure market category targeting data centers, airports, ports, and other high-load sectors). I led client engagements with National Grid (GridVISION 2.0 / AI for Operations and FERC 2222) and Avangrid (FERC 881).
Practice and platform leadership, how a senior partner orchestrates growth strategy, productization, business development, and delivery across an entire grid modernization practice.
SoftServe
-
Jun 8, 2026 - Present
Current
SoftServe brought me in as NVIDIA Solutions Director for Power & Utilities. There I built UtilityIQ, the utility AI use case library for the practice. A use case only earns a place if it names who buys it, which budget line pays for it, the NVIDIA technology behind it, how a pilot would prove it, and the pitch an executive will actually respond to.
UtilityIQ gives sellers and solution architects one place to start a utility conversation. It is organized across 24 utility operating domains, so a conversation starts from a problem the utility already owns, and it is built for the practice's discovery workshops, scoped pilots and NVIDIA co-sell motion.
AI solutions leadership inside a global practice, turning 33 years of operating and consulting perspective into a catalog a sales team can use on its next utility call.
GridCORTEX
-
Independently building
GridCORTEX is the AI-powered utility intelligence ecosystem for electric utilities that I architected independently. It is where everything I've built across the previous six chapters becomes the foundation for something the industry has never had: an intelligence layer that sits above the OT stack, answers the questions no system of record was ever built to answer, and now extends into the physical world with autonomous robotics and edge AI.
GridCORTEX is built on NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform, Earth-2 for weather physics, Isaac ROS 2 and Jetson Orin for physical AI, Omniverse for digital twins, NeMo and NIM for generative AI grounded in utility records, Metropolis for vision AI, and cuOpt for fleet-scale optimization. It encompasses nine modules, ten independently deployable agents, 24 operating domains and 190 utility-specific use cases, entering through the four domains utilities are funding today: Connect, Resilience, Asset, and Operations.
The 33 years of sitting in utility control centers, building the platforms, integrating the systems, and advising at the partner level are what make this different from a technology company building utility AI. I have operated the grid that GridCORTEX is designed to augment. I know the questions that fall between the systems because I lived in the gap layer before it had a name.
The intelligence layer above the grid: an AI ecosystem that sits on top of the systems a utility already owns, answers the questions those systems cannot. Operating actions stay with the operator, and what any engagement is permitted to write back is set in its scope. Augment the grid, never replace it.
Platform architecture, translating 33 years of operational and consulting perspective into the intelligence layer the utility industry has always needed but only now has the compute to build. The fifth clock, physical AI, is the newest and may be the fastest-moving. And I'm in the right seat to build for it.
I founded GridModHub, an independent grid modernization news and industry analysis site. It reads the industry from the utility side of the table, drawing on the same operating record behind every chapter above, rather than from a press release.
An independent voice on grid modernization, putting three decades of operating, vendor, integration and consulting experience to work on the stories that matter to utilities.
I've been the utility. I've built the product. I've integrated the systems. I've shaped the strategy. Now I'm building the intelligence layer above them all.
That perspective is what I bring to grid modernization, and it's increasingly rare.
After 33+ years of deliberately building the full 360° view, the highest-value applications of this background share a common shape.
Building the intelligence layer above the OT stack requires someone who has operated inside that stack, sold and deployed the platforms it runs on, integrated them at enterprise scale, and advised at the executive level about where it all needs to go. GridCORTEX is the expression of that combination.
Standing up a new grid modernization or AI practice, repositioning an existing one, or productizing a set of capabilities into something a market can buy. This is the pattern executed across two different companies, two different decades, and across vendor, consulting, and AI solutions business models.
Utility executive teams making large modernization and AI commitments who need an advisor who can translate between the boardroom and the control room without losing fidelity in either direction.
Bringing the full operator + vendor & developer + integrator + consultant + NVIDIA AI solutions perspective to utility accounts at the intersection of grid modernization and accelerated computing. The NVIDIA Lab Robotics portfolio applied to utility infrastructure. The Gap Layer made real.
Five things are converging in this industry that make the next 5-10 years the most important window of my career, hyperscaler load growth rewriting IRP across North America, AI moving from demos into real operator workflows, DER and grid-edge complexity outpacing current operating models, physical AI crossing the maturity threshold for live utility infrastructure, and the workforce retirement cliff creating an irreversible knowledge drain. GridCORTEX is the architecture built to answer all five at once.
I've been the utility. I've built the product. I've integrated the systems. I've shaped the strategy. Now I'm building the intelligence layer above them all.
Long before the control centers and the platforms, the same maker's instinct was building things by hand. Since 1993, Ronnie has designed and run Outlaw Incorporated, a Texas house of brands spanning leather, apparel, media, and marketing. The MR maker's mark that signs this site started there.