Utilities on the Brink of Disruption

HfS recently attended the International Utilities and Energy Conference (IUEC) 2016 in Madrid, hosted by Accenture. This annual conference brings together over a hundred C-level and senior executives from the global utility and energy industries. This year’s conference title was “Uncovering the opportunities from disruption” which manifested itself across the session with a weighted ten-word informal theme of “digital, digital, digital, disruption, disruption, disruption, transformation and cyber security”.​

The utilities industry has encountered different disruptive forces over the last few decades and now faces a new wave of impactful forces that need responses. Technological progress, growing demand, increasing costs and changing expectations in conjunction with the trends for distributed renewable generation, the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the climate change goals from the Paris COP21 Agreement are underpinning the next wave of disruption. Utility executives are looking to respond to this next wave by embracing new business models enabled by new digital and energy technologies and the IUEC provided an excellent forum to discuss these disruptions and the solutions that utilities are implementing in response to transform the industry.