Alexina Jackson brings system thinking and a willingness to test assumptions to the task of grid modernization.
During her early days in Quaker schools, Alexina Jackson learned to question everything and examine how systems work. Years later, those same principles are guiding her work to help build a clean, resilient, and modern electric grid.
Following an 11-year run at AES, Alexina recently launched a clean energy advisory called Seven Green Strategy, a reference to the seven greenhouse gases that cause climate change. As a lawyer and utility innovation leader, Alexina founded Seven Green Strategy to help large and small organizations accelerate their efforts to decarbonize. And sometimes, that starts by questioning the status quo.
This week on With Great Power, Alexina talks with Brad about what excites and frustrates her about grid enhancing technologies; why she thinks data efficiency and a strong data architecture are essential for the digital grid; and why she wants to see utilities change how they think about everything from competition to customer data.
With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.
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Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: As a kid, Alexina Jackson was already thinking outside the box.
Alexina Jackson: I was taught early on that really how you grow and advance your thinking is by being willing to question the status quo to learn and think in new ways, challenge your own prior beliefs.
Brad Langley: Her parents had always encouraged critical thinking. It's one of the main reasons they decided to enroll Alexina in a Quaker school near Baltimore, which is where she grew up.
Alexina Jackson: And the Quaker education is one that really teaches you how to think over rote memorization. It encourages you to collect data, to support your insights, and to really be a curious person who doesn't accept authority just because it's authority.
Brad Langley: Today, Alexina is a leading energy industry innovator with a law degree and now years of experience working with utilities. But that sense of curiosity -- it still guides her to this day.
Alexina Jackson: I don't think that innovation or asking questions are actually aggressive or negative or even criticizing. I actually think it's part of a healthy conversation. Sometimes I need to remind myself that many people are less embracing of change and find questions to maybe even be intimidating.
Brad Langley: During her undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, she studied economics and international relations with a focus on sustainable development. But when it came time to launch her career, she wasn't sure the well-worn paths in the government or foreign service were exactly right for her.
Alexina Jackson: I really thought about where I was going to have the greatest impact, and I felt that good, strong commercial arguments, economic arguments, ones that were going to drive that prosperity and economic growth, were going to be the ones that won the day and would have staying power.
Brad Langley: So Alexina took a consulting role with Monitor, a McKenzie spinoff focused on sustainable development. A few years later, she went to law school to focus on regulatory matters. And after six years as a lawyer at a big tech focus firm, she took a job with AES as ethics and compliance counsel. That was back in 2014. It ended up being the start of an 11-year run with utility that would combine her legal background with her interest in innovation.
Alexina Jackson: Moving from the legal side to the innovation side was actually quite natural. I had been supporting AES in negotiating key partnerships that were technology focused, leaning towards greener technologies, more modern customer experiences. One of the leaders at AES at the time said to me, "I keep forgetting you're the lawyer in the room. Would you come to the business side and bring that real sort of concrete problem-solving customer-focused lens to standing up customer solutions?"
Brad Langley: That was in 2020, but then after a reorganization at AES late last year, Alexina decided it was time to go in a different direction.
Alexina Jackson: There wasn't going to be an off-the-shelf job for me that was going to satisfy that same nature of wanting to work at system level, wanting to think through the status quo and see if there might be better ways to do work.
Brad Langley: So she launched Seven Green Strategy, a clean energy consultancy aimed at empowering the resilient growth of a smart digital electrical grid. For Alexina it was the best way to make an impact right now, a way to bring her experience and penchant for challenging assumptions to clients across the entire power sector. And she says the stakes couldn't be any higher.
Alexina Jackson: I connected back to climate change, which I do think is an existential issue that we're facing. We have a huge carbon equivalent debt that we are unfortunately not reducing. And so modernizing the grid I think will help us be able to better see the opportunities for addressing that debt as well as just continuing to bring prosperity and economic growth to society, which ultimately should be something that everyone can get behind.
Brad Langley: This is with Grid Power, a show about the people building the future grid today, I'm Brad Langley.
Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough, and while it might not, we seem like the most cutting edge industry. There are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable and customer centric. Today my guest is Alexina Jackson, founder and managing member of Seven Green Strategy. We talk about what's missing from grid modernization projects, her take on the state of innovation and large utilities and some of the key projects she worked on during her long tenure at AES. But first I asked her what she thinks of the state of emerging technologies in this space, starting with dynamic line rating,
Alexina Jackson: We could actually map out where in the grid different dynamic line rating technologies could be most economically helpful, and then we should just be deploying them at their right size value. This shouldn't be so much a question anymore. We need to know when we're running lines hot. We need to know when we're not running them enough or we could run them more. And we need to know how the surrounding topology of the land, of trees, of the grid itself actually impacts our ability to get the most efficient use of the grid.
Brad Langley: So why are there still questions about it? Are there certain barriers that you are coming up against as it pertains to DLR?
Alexina Jackson: It's pretty well accepted that there is not the clear regulatory push for DLR and that allows many utilities to take a more wait and see approach. I would hope that we would embrace the best available at the time and not wait for the regulators to require that. But that's not always the mindset. Compliance is extremely powerful. I'd love to see more carrots instead of always having to take a stick approach. Certainly some people will say we don't know enough about the technology, but I think that if we had the right regulatory incentives, we'd get over the hurdle quickly.
Brad Langley: Yep. Another question on AES along with GoogleX spinout tapestry, AES published a framework late last year that set out a roadmap for a digital electric grid. First at the high level, what is the digital electric grid?
Alexina Jackson: A digital electric grid really is about getting from an analog first environment, which I posit we're still in, right? Where our models are very heavily driven by human-entered assumptions to a grid where we have high quality data that is workflowed into the model, right? It's more real time information that is live and supported by arguably a shared workflow environment with appropriate data controls and everything, but that we can actually have a shared view. A digital twin would be a simple way of saying it, of the electrical grid. And then we start actually planning and operating the grid in that federated system. So just think internet of the grid and protocols and standards for engaging in the grid. And so we're just talking about recognizing that more of the assets that we use to consume energy, more of the assets that actually produce energy, and ultimately with tools like dynamic line rating, the lines themselves are digital.
One thing that wasn't covered in that report that I think is really essential to the data conversation is actually a data architecture. And within that construct, I think there is a really helpful understanding that we have customer data in the grid that we need to keep protected and secure. I think that we have an opportunity to recognize that we could create, at the other extreme, competitive data. And sometimes that feels strange when you think about a natural monopoly like the utility. And I think there's a whole conversation that people are having around whether or not one way to get utilities to more assertively adopt new technology and move into a more digital grid construct is by giving them a dose of sort of market competition, right? Allowing them to create value out of, for example, providing a more modern customer experience. And so if we actually define certain room for competitive benefit through data, you see utilities start collecting that data more effectively. And also making use of it to the customer benefit.
Those two, maybe you would call them bread slices on a sandwich, right? That's customer data on one end, competitive data on the other in the middle. I think there's a whole lot of data that is arguably generated by the operations of the grid data that if it were collected could be put to good use and is also arguably data that we as consumers of energy have paid for. Let's mobilize that data, whether that's exposing it as statistically significant anonymized data, taking more open source approaches as we see in high-end technology companies. But I think that would really accelerate innovation in the grid.
Brad Langley: How do you spur that competition in an industry that is basically filled by a bunch of monopolies that don't have competition? What does that look like in your mind?
Alexina Jackson: Well, certainly there are historical examples of the regulators introducing competition into the monopoly grid, and probably the most productive perhaps is the competitive generation. So we know how to put competition into the monopoly construct. Also, for example, requiring a utility to say, okay, well, I'm going to need more capacity in this particular area of the grid. How do I solve that problem? And then exposing that to a procurement process where technologists could come in and say, okay, you could do advanced conductors, you could do dynamic line reading plus storage, or you could do the traditional wires and substations
Brad Langley: And AI based autonomous agents are a key part of the Tapestry-AES framework. What are those and why do you think they're needed for an effective digital grid?
Alexina Jackson: Our grid is getting increasingly complex, and if you start allowing things to sort of pair in that protocols based federated approach, you're going to have just more points of interaction. So AI can be extremely helpful to humans in managing complexity. And I'm assuming obviously that AI, when I say that is well-trained on good data, a couple assumptions underline that, but AI can help manage the complexity, and an agent-based system allows you to assign jobs to a whole fleet of AI. So for example, in a conservative system, you might say, well, I don't want AI making a bunch of decisions. For me, obviously we would've trained that AI first. We would've made sure that it's making consistent good decisions, but you can actually assign a different agent to oversee that agent. So you can create levels of review before actions are taken
Brad Langley: From where you sit now, looking through a wider lens of the power sector, what do you think are the most important problems to be solved across the industry?
Alexina Jackson: I would probably say that the most immediate one is really about getting data into our conversations, because I think that's how we're going to make better decisions. When many people talk about data centers and load growth associated with it, they're very smart people who put a question mark around those load growth projections. Things, for example, around the projections are often created by ambitious utility views of perhaps maybe getting data centers in their footprint. And so what is maybe a probability adjusted view of that growth? And also, it's probably not all in one year. So even if we're looking at 8% data center load growth year over year, that might be closer to 2% or 3%, and we know how to do that load growth, and that's also going to be concentrated in certain areas. So this is just an illustration of, I think the data will help us understand the nuances of what we need to do better so that we don't spend money where we don't need to, and that we can do it more strategically. And also we don't create this sense of emergency where some good data could allow us to take a step back and say, oh, we know how to solve this.
Brad Langley: So when you talk to utilities or technology companies about this challenge in particular, do you feel like they're asking the right questions or that they're allocating the proper resources? Are they viewing this as too big of a problem? And so it's kind of like mitigating their ability to respond?
Alexina Jackson: I do think that it seems like a very large problem, and it is. This is a critical industry, which is why it became a monopoly, a natural monopoly in a regulated industry in the first place, right? It is a complex system to change. I do think the largeness of it can lead to just using the tools that people already know how to use, and therefore making some pretty broad-brush statements instead of getting to the root cause of things. And because historically the data has been held very closely by utilities, I think there's also probably just a component of not wanting to release or seed control of certain information and decisions. These are companies that have obligations to their shareholders, and so the best way to drive economic certainty is to maintain control. I don't think that's a long-term winning strategy, but I understand why it's scary.
Brad Langley: So data has been a pretty consistent theme in our conversation today. I know you've been doing some thinking and some writing on this concept of data efficiency when it comes to the digital grid architecture. Walk me through what you mean by data efficiency and what it means in the digital grid context.
Alexina Jackson: Again, going to the data center conversation, just because I think it's a really ripe one. A lot of people say, okay, we've got to connect these data centers with a lot of capacity behind them because they need to process a ton of data. And I think we're accepting that statement without unpacking it and saying, okay, do they really need to process every piece of data? So sometimes I've joked with people, I'm not sure we need to process every cat meme out there right now if we're trying to rescue a bunch of cats who are feral cats and we want to get them adopted, maybe we want to process a lot of cat pictures. But for the energy transition, I don't think we need to process every piece of data. In fact, there are actually rules of thumb around how much data you need to put into any model.
And if you don't do the front end work of making sure that the data that goes in is good quality data, then you kind of go from an efficient data set, right? Saying like, okay, we've had humans on the front end saying, what's the question we want to answer? And what data advances our knowledge around that question? But if you just throw in the kitchen sink, you need multiple kitchen sinks because then the AI needs to figure out, well, which of these is relevant? Not all of this data is helpful, so now I need even more data to figure out what data is helpful. So you can see how that problem would accelerate really quickly. So data efficiency I think begins with understanding what it is that we're trying to answer and then saying what data actually helps us advance answers to those questions and then beginning to process it. So that's probably just one example. I have a couple others, but I'll pause there for a minute.
Brad Langley: Yeah, I'd love to hear another one. I'd also advocate, in addition to the cat meme videos, we don't have to process every TikTok video that gets produced either. It would certainly save my kids some screen time during the day, but yeah, I'd love an additional example of that.
Alexina Jackson: Yeah, I think too, when we think about data efficiency, there is a very natural feedback loop for data centers themselves, or even the energy industry itself. If we start saying there's a relationship between data processing and energy consumption, both data centers and energy producers, if they're thinking about solving for a good functioning grid or a good functioning enterprise on the side of data centers, they're going to want to hack that value chain. So a data center is going to say, okay, water, land, energy, these are all critical inputs to the affordability of my business model. And so if energy and data production are connected, then you're going to say, well, I may not want to process every piece of data because there's going to be a correlation between processing that data and increasing my cost around energy. And so there's probably actually an optimization in there within the data center's own value chain.
And then if you think if the energy system says, well, I need to solve these increasing connection challenges. If I actually understood my grid better, I might be processing more data, but then that means that I'm also causing perhaps more reliability, more resource adequacy challenges. So if you start looking at the system interconnectedness, then you start recognizing that there is an optimization between energy and data processing, and that two of the key players in that equation have natural incentives to find that optimization to bring down cost and improve margins. And so I think there's a whole quite interesting conversation that maybe AI could help us find the optimization there, but now I'm introducing more data processing. So it's a system challenge, and I do think ultimately it will work out in the wash what that optimization is, because that's the nature of a competitive market.
Brad Langley: Fascinating. We call this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote, with great power comes great responsibility. So what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Alexina Jackson: Oh, this one's always a bit awkward because saying that you have the superpower is always feels like you're stepping out on a limb there. But I do think that it comes from that curiosity that we've talked about. I am a very calm person, and so I do believe that if we take the pause and we say, okay, what is actually going on? What is the root cause of the situation that we're in? And reduce the question to more bite-sized components, I have great confidence that we've got a lot of really smart people who can solve this issue. So it's just really about getting around the table and asking those questions. And I think that I am a convener who is capable of reducing the component parts to meaningful questions that are then tangible things to solve.
Brad Langley: Excellent. Alexina, thank you so much for your time.
Alexina Jackson: I appreciate it, Brad. It was a lot of fun.
Brad Langley: Alexina Jackson is founder and managing member of Seven Green Strategy.
With Grid Power is produced by GridEx in partnership with Latitude Studios, delivering on our clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey, GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy -- all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.
Our production team includes Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O'Connor. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you -- and we really hope it is -- we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate or review us on Apple or Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Brad Langley.