CHAPTER 01 · OVERVIEW
A Regional Grid Operator's Control Room, Rebuilt Around AI
One working session found a control room explaining anomalies from memory across a dozen disconnected screens. Three months later, every anomaly comes with a cause, not just an alarm.
An alarm would fire and the control room would spend the first ten minutes just figuring out what it actually meant — pulling up three different systems to piece together a story the data already had. On critical infrastructure, ten minutes of confusion is the whole risk.
Industry
Utility & Critical Infrastructure Operations
Operation
Regional electric utility · generation + transmission assets · NERC-regulated · 24/7 control room operations
Systems in place
SCADA/EMS · legacy control-room dashboards · shared drives · paper shift logs
Scope
3 balancing-authority regions in scope
WHAT SOLVING THIS REALLY MEANT
This Wasn't About a Dashboard
The cost of a slow explanation
A flagged anomaly that takes ten minutes to explain is ten minutes where nobody outside the control room knows if it's a blip or the start of something. On the grid, that gap is where real risk lives.
The compliance exposure
NERC reporting requirements don't forgive 'we're still figuring out what happened.' An unexplained anomaly is a finding waiting to happen.
The single-operator bottleneck
Only two people on shift could reliably read the balancing-authority data fast enough to catch a real problem early. Everyone else was waiting on them.
HOW AN ENGAGEMENT RUNS
Same Three Phases, Every Time
01 · Day 0
Discover
One working day, on-site with the control room. We interview shift operators, watch a live shift, map how anomalies actually get explained today, and score what we find.
02 · Weeks 1–5
Build
The first system shipped inside the control room's existing screens — no new SCADA integration, no rip-and-replace.
03 · Ongoing
Operate
We tune detection thresholds, add the next monitoring workflow, and keep the security model current as real usage comes in.
OPERATING BENCHMARK
21 days
from the first working session to the first AI system live in the control room
$9.2M
modeled annual value, once every wave is live
3
Facilities in scope, one team
Annual Value Created
Modeled from the discovery baseline. Value is captured across cost reduction, revenue growth, and risk mitigation — not cost alone.
UP NEXT · DISCOVER