Episode #137: ‘Turning Innovative Ideas into Practical Utility Solutions’ with Aron Patrick, Head of R&D at PPL Corporation [an Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast]

One such leader will guide this conversation on the podcast, as host Jason Price and producer Matt Chester are joined by the Head of R&D at PPL Corporation, Aron Patrick. Aron guides the listener through the intricacies of managing nearly 150 active R&D projects at once while discovering pivotal strategies to fuel PPL’s drive for clean, reliable, and affordable energy. Listen in as Aron unravels the PPL approach to the energy transition through partnerships, technology development, and merging tradition with modern solutions.

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Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast: West Monroe.  

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TRANSCRIPT

Jason Price: 

Welcome to the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast, the show that brings leading minds from the energy industry to discuss the challenges and trends that are transforming and modernizing our energy system. And a quick thank you to West Monroe, our sponsor of today’s show. Now, let’s talk energy.

I am Jason Price, Energy Central podcast host and director with West Monroe. Coming to you from New York City. And with me as always. From Orlando, Florida is Energy Central producer and community manager, Matt Chester.

Matt, today we’re going behind the scenes with the R&D side of the utilities sector. While outsiders may still hold onto the outdated stereotypes that utilities are not innovative, we’ve been fortunate enough to speak with a number of guests, including today’s, who represent innovation, experimenting with novel and modern tools, technologies, and systems. Matt, recap for us some past discussions around innovation at the utilities.

Matt Chester: 

Yeah, that’s right, Jason. We’ve been very fortunate and intentional really in having so many of our guests in the past represent that true spirit of innovation who are driving utilities to think new, to think different. Some specific episodes that stick out in that regard we’re the ones with Josh Gold, the director of innovation at Duquesne Light Company. Jody Allison, the VP of transformation at Algonquin Power. Alan MacAnespie, the principal innovation specialist at Baltimore Gas and Electric. And King Look, the director of R&D at Con Edison. These episodes and more like them are all on our SoundCloud podcast playlist called Innovating the Future of Energy. And today’s guest will fit right into that playlist as well.

Jason Price: 

He sure will. Thanks for that, Matt. And yes, we’re excited to welcome yet another pioneer in the utility space to our podcast booth and pick his brain on the ways in which innovation should become a part of the utility DNA. Today we welcome in Aron Patrick, the director of research and development at PPL Corporation. As head of R&D at PPL, which includes Rhode Island Energy, Louisville Gas and Electric, Kentucky Utilities, Old Dominion Power, and PPL Electric Utilities, Aron oversees enterprise wide innovation, bringing new and unique ideas that can help PPL drive towards common utility goals of clean, reliable, and affordable energy. And with 148 active R&D projects he’s overseeing, we know he’s a busy man, so we want to dive right into it. So Aron Patrick, welcome to the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

Aron Patrick: 

I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jason Price: 

Terrific. We’re thrilled to have you as well. Before we get too deep into the conversation, talking about all the fun projects taking place at PPL, I’d love for you to share a bit about your background with our audience. What exactly does your job as director of R&D entail, and what was your journey like getting to that role?

Aron Patrick: 

Sure, I’m happy to talk about that. Our goal at PPL is really nothing short of being the absolute best utility in the United States. And as you know, R&D into new technologies or new and innovative ideas is really critical to improving the way that we provide safe, reliable, and sustainable energy to our customers. So as head of R&D, I’m responsible for developing and managing our enterprise wide R&D strategy, focused on generation, electric and gas delivery and even potential behind the meter opportunities. So I oversee and expand PPL’s partnerships with external resource organizations, including national laboratories and universities. And I also coordinate our enterprise-wide participation in venture funds like Energy Impact Partners, and also coordinate our engagement with external nonprofit resource organizations like the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI.

I’ve had the pleasure of working for PPL for more than seven years now in R&D as well as in data analytics. I’ve actually been in the energy industry for just over 15 years. Before joining PPL I was a civil servant with Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet where I was assistant director in charge of renewable energy, data analytics and carbon management. Prior to working for the state government, I was actually in the federal government where I worked as a data scientist for the intelligence community.

Jason Price: 

I mentioned that you manage 140 R&D projects, which is quite a task. So how do you prioritize and ensure that these projects align with PPL’s long-term vision for the utility of the future?

Aron Patrick: 

Managing 150 research projects is challenging, certainly, but our approach is to remain focused on our overall goal and our overall mission. So as you know, our mission is really to provide safe, reliable, and sustainable energy to our customers. But more so the big challenge that we face today is helping to achieve our corporate goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Our projects are focused on improving sustainability and accelerating development of clean energy technology. And when deciding which projects we should focus on and what kind of resources we should invest in each space, we evaluate how much each project would contribute to our mission of providing safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy to our customers. So my team looks at the feasibility of each project when it would be available. For example, we’re obviously focused on projects that will deliver results in the coming decades rather than over the longer term. And we’re looking to be able to provide that value to our customers.

Jason Price: 

And while all this R&D seems to be paying off, PPL seems to embody innovation and recently was the recipient of a number of industry recognitions in various categories. So I see that the hard work is paying off. Can you take a moment and share with a listen of some of these recognitions?

Aron Patrick: 

PPL Electric Utilities won the 2023 Edison Award for the Edison Electric Institute and the Southeast Electric Exchange for use of the dynamic line rating model, or DLR, which increases the amount of electricity delivered over our transmission lines and ensures reliability. Also, this year we won two EPRI Technology Transfer Awards for sustainable solar vegetation management and for modernizing the distribution planning with various automated tools and sensors.

Jason Price: 

That’s a nice industry recognition. As director of R&D for PPL, you oversee this impressive quantity of projects, these 148, 150 you mentioned, across the company. Can you share some of the most exciting projects currently in progress that focus on grid mod?

Aron Patrick: 

Absolutely. So we’re building the utility of the future and the projects that I love most are the projects that help us integrate renewables onto a smarter grid of the future. As you know, since the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, integrating renewables can be challenging for certain parts of our transmission and distribution systems specifically. So we’re working with innovative new technologies as well as updating infrastructure where necessary to make the transition to renewables and to net-zero while maintaining reliability and affordability for our customers. So the utility of the future we’re building leverages these new innovations such as smart sensors that report outages instantly, autonomously, and even sensors integrated with AI, artificial intelligence, that can actually help predict and prevent outages even before they occur.

Jason Price: 

Aron, you’ve shared that your passion is building the technologies and strategies that PPL and other utilities will use to enable the energy transition. So can you speak to what specific targets PPL is working towards and how you’re ensuring that these efforts benefit not just PPL, but the wider power sector?

Aron Patrick: 

I’m so glad you asked that because as you know, the single most important research challenge before us, not just for our corporation or for our portfolio of companies, but for the energy industry as a whole and society as a whole, is the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions that could contribute to climate change. The PPL Corporation together with every one of our portfolio companies have set a very ambitious goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and to achieve an 80% reduction by 2040. Achieving a net-zero future and going further, faster, and even moving ahead of our goals to address climate change requires new ideas and fundamental advances in technologies.

Jason Price: 

Interesting. So grid reliability is a major issue as we continue to de-carb the grid. So I really want to hear from you on what is some of the significant focus on building a smart grid and integrating various energy resources that you’re involved in, and how is R&D helping to enhance the reliability and efficiency of PPLs energy distribution system?

Aron Patrick: 

That’s a really great question. So as we already discussed, since the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, moving our national energy grid from a legacy system of fossil fuel plants that we can turn on and off as we need, switching them over to renewable resources, renewable but intermittent energy resources is a really big challenge. And indeed, I would say that it’s the greatest single energy challenge of our time. So this modern, comfortable and connected world that we live in today, it’s not accustomed to having intermittent energy that the sun or wind provides. We expect the lights to come on when we flip a switch at night. We expect our homes to be warm in the winter no matter what the weather is like outside. And our research has demonstrated that by integrating a very diverse mix of renewable resources at diverse locations across our service territory, that we’ll be able to ameliorate the intermittency of renewables.

In addition to renewables, we have built and have plans to build even more energy storage to store that renewable energy. We have both short duration and fast responding energy storage like lithium ion already on the ground at our properties, but we’re planning on building longer duration energy storage that will enable us to store renewables for longer periods of time. Those batteries and all inverter based resources actually, whether that’s solar or batteries, also have the ability to provide frequency and voltage support to hold up and support the transmission and distribution systems even in the face of intermittency. And in our laboratories right now, we’re actually actively experimenting with green hydrogen from 100% renewable energy resources. And we have plans to scale up that technology in an exciting new project that we’ll be announcing in early 2024.

Jason Price: 

That’s really interesting. You really crossed the gamut in a bunch of different areas. So I’m going to ask you about partnerships. In our lead up call you talked about the role of federal funding in projects, but then you bring on other types of entities as partners like universities or other utilities. So can you elaborate on how these partnerships have helped secure funding and ultimately deliver on the desired successes?

Aron Patrick: 

Yes. As you know, the vast majority of the research we do here at PPL is actually funded by federal research grants. But you’re right, we’re not working on those grants alone. It’s all about partnership. We believe that to be truly successful in R&D requires strong partnerships. So we’ve built a strong network of public private research partnerships that have so far been very, very successful at securing federal funding and meeting our research objectives. So it’s really with the universities that we’re building a research triangle of sorts with the colleges of engineering at three of our key partner schools in three of the states we serve. We’re working with the University of Rhode Island, the University of Kentucky, and Penn State University. These public private partnerships are really the key to our R&D strategy. These public universities, they bring the top talent, they bring cutting edge technology, research laboratory, and a mission to serve the public. We also have a mission to serve the public, but we’re bringing real world problems and real world data to the universities.

We’re also partnering with other utilities like PPL, private companies and global nonprofit research organizations like the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI.

Jason Price: 

Yeah, back to R&D. As you know, the utility industry is often perceived as traditional conservative and slow to move. At PPL though, you highlighted a more innovative and collaborative environment, and we’ve certainly heard this from other utilities, the utility guests in the R&D space. So clearly that’s a perception that’s of the past. But taking those innovations and making them public so that the community sees the kind of innovation that you’re doing is also key. It’s the messaging. Can you speak to how PPL’s approach to data transparency and real-time streaming sets you apart from other utilities?

Aron Patrick: 

Absolutely. I’d be so happy to. Good research requires access to good data and lots of it. And it’s not just a lot of data and high quality data, it’s also timely data. And this has been a key to our success in R&D. We pride ourselves in transparency and the data sharing capabilities we’ve developed. For example, I believe we’re the first utility in the world to share real time, minute to minute solar, hydro, battery and other data to the public in real time via our public websites. The data go directly from our solar or battery inverters, for example, to the public internet in less than 10 seconds. So from a public website, you can watch solar, hydro or battery power changing in real time and even download every minute of data going back seven years.

And it’s not just the energy or power data that we’re sharing. We’re also live streaming the ambient weather conditions that impact those systems as well, such as sunlight or solar or radiance temperature and wind speed. We also have live streaming video feeds from our solar sites, which are really fun because you can actually see, for example, a cloud rolling over the horizon. And then with that live streaming data, you can see the impact that that cloud had on solar output in terms of power and energy. So it’s really a unique, and I believe, an unprecedented level of transparency and data sharing that is absolutely critical to our success in R&D. It’s not just the live streaming of the data, our research partners, the universities, those nonprofits and even several national laboratories depend upon that data and they depend upon the timeliness and transparency of that data.

So together with our partners, we’ve published over 120 academic publications on battery storage, renewable energy, carbon capture, electrification and distribution and transmission using the data that we’ve collected and shared with our partners. All of our data and all the publications that have been published can be found on our website at pplweb.com/research.

Jason Price: 

That’s really interesting. We’ve spoken to a lot of R&D directors and no one has conveyed it in that manner that you can see this in real times. That’s really interesting. I’ll have to check that out.

All right, but R&D is R&D. It’s in the lab, it’s pilots. So talk to us about how you operationalize these results. How do you take the R&D results into a full-blown project implementation?

Aron Patrick: 

That’s a really great question. So we have R&D projects that include advanced technologies. These might be cutting edge sensors or distribution and transmission support functionality of our lithium ion batteries, or they can be older technologies. For example. We’ve deployed blocks of sheep at our solar farms to graze and manage that vegetation. We try to be an incubator for creativity and innovation, and that really starts with being open to new ideas, to discussing those new ideas internally, asking ourselves the question, what will it take to be the best utility in the United States? What is required to be the utility of the future? We ask that question of our staff, not just in R&D, but all across our business. We ask that question of our partners at universities and external research organizations. And then we bring those ideas together and try to implement the innovation where we can.

So R&D has placed its focus on two main technology areas where we refer to as modern technologies and future technologies. So the modern technologies are things that we could implement today, meaning that it’s something we could build today and it’s something that’s economic, meaning that it’ll actually lower costs for our customers if we deploy that technology. And then we have another series of technologies that are a little bit more futuristic, what we call these future technologies. And those include technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen and long duration energy storage. So we do split our time pretty evenly across those two sections. Trying to deploy technologies today that can provide immediate value to our customers, but also being forward-thinking about technologies that are on the horizon 5 or 10 years out that are going to enable us to be the utility of the future and to be providing the best in class services to our customers in the future.

Jason Price: 

Yeah, it’s certainly an impressive story and an impressive journey coming out of PPL. So, we want to thank you for this fascinating discussion. And we also want to learn a little bit more about you the person rather than just you, the professional. So we have what’s now called the lightning round where we ask you a set of questions and you give us a one word or phrase answer. So Aron, are you ready?

Aron Patrick: 

I will certainly try.

Jason Price: 

All right. You’re probably born and raised in Kentucky. If someone were to come to your state, what’s one place they have to visit or one thing they have to try?

Aron Patrick: 

If I were to visit Kentucky and I only had one day, I would go to Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Mercer County, Kentucky. We’ve partnered with Shaker Village to provide the sheep that graze our solar farm, but I love going there. They have 3000 acres of beautiful nature preserves, wildlife and farm animals. And they also have an absolutely amazing restaurant that serves what I believe to be, and this is very controversial what I’m about to say, the best fried chicken in Kentucky.

Jason Price: 

What’s your favorite way to implement clean energy or energy efficiency in your everyday life?

Aron Patrick: 

My husband Scott and I have invested in solar panels that we use to try to achieve net-zero renewable generation for our home. And so we have both solar as well as smart metering that we have in our house, and we really try to shift our energy use towards the daytime, towards periods of time where the sun is shining so we can have as much of our energy in our home coming from solar power as possible.

Jason Price: 

That’s great. How do you incorporate some of your lessons learned at work in your everyday life?

Aron Patrick: 

Well, I’ve been studying renewable energy for 15 years and I love studying our home’s energy use and, like I said, trying to sync up our home energy use with renewable energy. I also drive an electric vehicle and love to try to charge that vehicle as much as possible from renewables. So I even have at my house electric lawnmowers, electric weed eaters, et cetera. So I’m really trying to take what I’ve learned at work and apply it in my everyday life.

Jason Price: 

And lastly, what career would you have taken if not for the utilities?

Aron Patrick: 

Well, it’s a little bit of a secret, but I used to be a translator actually and really loved traveling overseas and doing real time translation. So I think one of my secret career goals has always been to be in the diplomatic service and work in a US consulate or a US embassy overseas. I really do love foreign language and learning about different cultures and different people from all over the world.

Jason Price: 

Aron, certainly a well-rounded individual. It’s impressive. I really got to learn a lot more about you. This is great, Aron. Thank you for sharing and thank you for giving some more insight in today’s conversation about the work you’re doing and the great work coming out of PPL and the R&D world. So we want to give you the final word. So knowing that you have the Energy Central community made up of utility professionals and leaders in the space, what are some lasting message or thoughts you want them to take away from today’s call?

Aron Patrick: 

We can be and we will be successful in our efforts to decarbonize the electricity grid and to move over to increasing amounts of renewable energy in the future. We can be and we will be. That’d be my advice.

Jason Price: 

That’s great. I want to thank you Aron Patrick for joining us in today’s call and having this insightful conversation. I know our community will continue to discuss these topics at energycentral.com and hopefully you can be around to response to some of their questions and comments as the come in. Until then, though, we want to thank you for sharing your insight on today’s show.

Aron Patrick: 

Thanks for having me.

Jason Price: 

We also want to give a shout-out a thanks to the podcast sponsors that made today’s episode possible. Thanks to West Monroe. West Monroe works with the nation’s largest electric, gas and water utilities in their telecommunication grid modernization and digital workforce transformations. West Monroe brings a multidisciplinary team that blends utility, operations and technology expertise to address modernizing aging infrastructure, advisory on transportation electrification, ADMS deployments, data and analytics and cybersecurity. And once again, I’m your host Jason Price. So plug in and stay fully charged in the discussion by hopping into the community at energycentral.com and we’ll see you next time at the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast.

About Energy Central Podcasts

The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ features conversations with thought leaders in the utility sector. At least twice monthly, we connect with an Energy Central Power Industry Network community member to discuss compelling topics that impact professionals who work in the power industry. Some podcasts may be a continuation of thought-provoking posts or discussions started in the community or with an industry leader that is interested in sharing their expertise and doing a deeper dive into hot topics or issues relevant to the industry.

The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ is the premiere podcast series from Energy Central, a Power Industry Network of Communities built specifically for professionals in the electric power industry and a place where professionals can share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Supported by leading industry organizations, our mission is to help global power industry professionals work better. Since 1995, we’ve been a trusted news and information source for professionals working in the power industry, and today our managed communities are a place for lively discussions, debates, and analysis to take place. If you’re not yet a member, visit www.EnergyCentral.com to register for free and join over 200,000 of your peers working in the power industry.

The Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast is hosted by Jason Price, Community Ambassador of Energy Central. Jason is a Business Development Executive at West Monroe, working in the East Coast Energy and Utilities Group. Jason is joined in the podcast booth by the producer of the podcast, Matt Chester, who is also the Community Manager of Energy Central and energy analyst/independent consultant in energy policy, markets, and technology.  

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