What can the Quakers teach us about building a digital electric grid?

In a utility industry driven by risk-averse decision making, Alexina Jackson’s approach to grid modernization is deliberately disruptive — forged by a Quaker education that taught her to question authority and support insights with hard data.

“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,” Jackson explained on the With Great Power podcast.

As the founder of Seven Green Strategy and a former VP at the global energy company AES, Jackson has channeled this mindset to help utilities break the status quo. Central to her work is the concept of a fully digital electric grid that utilizes AI — still a significant leap from today’s patchwork of analog and digital operations.

“A digital electric grid really is about getting from an analog first environment, which I posit we’re still in, to a grid where we have high-quality data that is workflowed into the model,” Jackson explained. “It’s more real-time information that is live and supported by a shared workflow environment with appropriate data controls.” And this transformation requires more than just adding sensors and software; it demands a fundamental rethinking of how utilities collect, manage, and utilize data.

Informed by her work at AES, Jackson proposes a three-tiered data architecture that distinguishes between protected customer data, competitive data that utilities can leverage for innovation, and operational grid data that could be more openly shared. Jackson argues that grid operations generate valuable data that consumers have already paid for through their utility bills. By mobilizing this data through anonymized, open-source approaches, she believes innovation would accelerate across the sector.

“Let’s mobilize that data, whether that’s exposing it as statistically significant anonymized data or taking more open-source approaches as we see in high-end technology companies,” she said. “But I think that would really accelerate innovation in the grid.

Despite the natural monopoly structure of utilities, Jackson sees opportunities to introduce competitive elements that could drive faster technology adoption. She points to historical precedents like competitive generation as successful models.

“We know how to put competition into the monopoly construct,” she said. For example, utilities could expose capacity needs to competitive procurement processes where newer technologies could compete with traditional infrastructure solutions.

This competitive approach could help accelerate adoption of these technologies like dynamic line rating, which enables more precise determination of transmission line capacity based on real-time conditions rather than static, conservative ratings. Without clear regulatory incentives, however, many utilities default to a wait-and-see approach.

“I’d love to see more carrots instead of always having to take a stick approach,” Jackson observed. With the right incentives, she believes utilities would quickly overcome hesitations about new technologies.

As grids become increasingly complex, with more distributed resources and points of interaction, Jackson sees artificial intelligence playing a crucial role through autonomous agents that can manage this complexity at scale.

“AI can be extremely helpful to humans in managing complexity,” Jackson explained. “An agent-based system allows you to assign jobs to a whole fleet of AI. For example, in a conservative system, you might say, ‘I don’t want AI making a bunch of decisions.’ You can actually assign a different agent to oversee that agent. So you can create levels of review before actions are taken.”

When addressing pressing issues like the rapid growth of data centers and their impact on grid capacity planning, Jackson advocates for a more nuanced, data-driven approach rather than broad assumptions. She questions whether utility projections of data center growth might be inflated or improperly timed, suggesting more granular analysis could prevent unnecessary spending.

Jackson also introduces the concept of “data efficiency” — being more strategic about what data we collect and process — and how it relates to energy consumption and business optimization.

“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,” she noted. “This is just an illustration of how 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.”

Throughout her approach to these complex problems, Jackson returns to the principles that guided her in her Quaker upbringing — curiosity, questioning assumptions, and looking for data to support insights.

“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,” Jackson said.

For the full conversation with Alexina Jackson, listen to her interview on season 4 of With Great Power here.

With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.

Read the original article from Latitude Media here.