Reframing network-as-a-service architecture for skeptical utility VPs

How do you make DER integration feel urgent to utility leaders without oversimplifying the protection engineering?

When DER growth became a major opportunity for utilities, Sensus needed to tell the risk side of the story before the market treated integration as a simple plug-and-play problem.

They didn’t need lighter executive language. They needed a “no fluff” technical resource that would be strong enough to earn the trust of technically-savvy utility execs.

My role was to help preserve the technical depth while shaping the argument around operational stakes, such as reliability, visibility, worker safety, rate recovery, and the risk of DER integration without the right control architecture.

The white paper is not just “technical content.” It frames DER growth as a reliability and safety problem: utility-scale solar and wind are increasing grid complexity, and unintentional islanding can create overvoltage, bidirectional power flow, employee safety hazards, and equipment risk.

The piece then moves from problem to limitation of existing approaches: traditional Direct Transfer Trip methods, remote DER sites, expensive communication extensions — and introduces point-to-multipoint communications as a more scalable monitoring/control architecture.

Xylem's Sensus brand provides remotely-managed products and solutions that deliver the right data at the right time for investor-owned utilities, cooperatives and municipalities.