30 Years of Power: How Tech & Renewables Are Shaping the Industry 

Key Insights 

• The fundamentals of electricity remain, but the technology used for generation and distribution has advanced, giving consumers more control over usage./  

• The shift to renewable energy sources like solar and wind, along with self-sufficiency options, empowers individuals and challenges traditional grid systems.  

• With data centers expanding into rural areas, electric cooperatives face increasing demands for reliable power and cooling infrastructure.  

• Venkat Banunarayan’s journey through various organizations underscores the value of adaptability and a broad perspective in the energy sector.  

In an in-depth conversation with Louis Montgomery, Jr., BrainWorks’ Clean Energy and Renewables National Practice Leader, Venkat Banunarayan, Vice President of Integrated Grid at the National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association (NRECA), shares his insights on the energy industry’s evolution.  

With 30 years of experience spanning roles at GE, ICF, and the Department of Energy, Venkat provides a rich perspective on how advances in technology, renewables, and self-sufficiency are reshaping electricity generation and distribution. He dives into the role of rural cooperatives in meeting new demands and explores how data centers and AI are influencing the grid’s future.  

Louis Montgomery, Jr.: Venkat, thank you so much again for your time. You’ve got an impressive background with a master’s degree and PhD in electrical engineering, and an MBA. What initially attracted you to the power industry?  

Venkat Banunarayan: Growing up, my father was an electrical engineer. He worked in India for the local electricity utility for the state. He worked for almost 40 years, so I was exposed to electrical engineering from pretty much the day I was born. I did my bachelor’s in a more general electrical and electronics engineering and then gravitated towards electrical engineering because it spoke to me a little bit of the fundamentals in terms of what’s happening in electrical engineering, how we get our power, how do we consumer it, and how do we use it? It fascinated me. It was never my intention, or at least deliberate intention, to follow in my father’s footsteps, but it happened that way.  

LM: What has changed over the course of the 30 years that you’ve been in the field?  

VB: So, let me start with telling you what hasn’t changed and then I’ll tell you what has changed. So, what hasn’t changed is the fundamental principles by which we generate, transmit, and consume electricity. You start with Michael Faraday back in the 18th century, and then all the fundamental laws that govern electricity. That hasn’t changed. However, what has changed is the various technologies that we use to generate electricity. One example, of course, is that we are transitioning from a fossil fuels-based generation to more renewable based generation. There are both technical and economic challenges with that.  

What is not changing is we still need those big transmission towers and transmission lines to transmit electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s being consumed. However, there are a lot of technologies that help us make it easier to do. In terms of monitoring, in terms of control, and when we come to the distribution side, where retail, commercial, industrial, where we consume electricity. A lot has changed in technology, and it has given consumers more control over how they consume electricity. One example that everyone can relate to is a smart thermostat, like Nest, which gives much more granular control, programmable control, things like that.  

Another one is smart circuit boards, replacing usual, boring, traditional circuit panel that is there in every house. Every building has gotten much smarter. You can program it, you can look at it online, you can do a lot of things with it that you weren’t able to do before. And then you have all the smart appliances. The other thing that’s changed is the generation of electricity. A lot of it is still fossil-fuel based. As I mentioned, there’s renewable-based generation, solar and wind.  

What has also given consumers more control and power is the fact that they can generate their own electricity to some context. They can access and generate electricity on their roof from rooftop solar panels. They can put in batteries to charge when they want to and discharge electricity when they want to. Things like that have also changed the landscape. The other thing overall the industry that’s changed is the phenomenon known as self-sufficiency.  

Digitization, meaning, that what was done in an analog fashion before, as with the advent of more sophisticated computing power and computers being more and more digital.  

LM: What does that mean when you say digitization?  

VB: It means you’re able to look at things much faster, much more granular, and have much more control options than you did before. So, it’s a better understanding of what’s happening on the grid.  

LM: Great, I appreciate that. Well, you’ve had a very diverse career having worked at GE, for the US Department of Energy, ICF International, and now the National Electric Cooperative Association. How have you managed to navigate your career through some pretty different kinds of organizations?  

VB: I’ve been very fortunate, in one sense, that every organization I’ve worked for has been very, very different from the previous one. That is something that I am very thankful for because, at that time it may be frustrating to get used to the new organization, used to the new processes, but when I look back, all it gave me was a wealth of experience.  

So, starting off, after I finished my PhD, I looked at options of joining different kinds of companies, but then settled for a large company, one of the world’s largest at that time, GE, simply because it gave me a variety of options that I can test and I can work on without really leaving that company. I was able to interact with a variety of people and businesses from across the world. S&G is a truly global company, so that gave me a very good bird’s eye view of what’s happening across the industry, and across the markets the industry is serving.  

That gave me a good starting point in my career. I spent close to 10 years of my professional life at GE, then buried in that is two years of an expatriate assignment back in my home country, India. I was looking at the Asian market, Middle East, and African market for GE, looking at consulting opportunities, the electricity market, things like that.  

So, all in all, an excellent introduction to my professional career. And then I said, “okay, let’s look at being able to get deeper involved in projects and deeper with clients.” Then, I went to ICF, a very well-known billion-dollar consulting company. They do a variety of things—energy consulting, education, healthcare, cyber, and more.  

In the energy practice, I was exposed to a variety of clients and was able to help them solve their problems. It was very fulfilling. While I was at ICF, I was transitioning from a global to a more consulting focus. And then, the Department of Energy came and there I was asked to lead the integration of solar programs and activities. It’s very different working in a government organization, interacting with world-class researchers and research institutions, such as national labs in the US and different industry stakeholders, and being able to distill common viewpoints, communicate back to the organization, develop funding opportunities, how to assist them in doing their work, and then really monitoring programs and the successes and so on. This gave me the entire life cycle all the way from inception of funding to completion of a project and measuring its benefits, very different set of experience.  

Finally, where I am now, a trade association for rural electric cooperatives. I lead one of the research teams—integrated grid team. I view this as a culmination of my experience in other companies and other ways which I’ve gained experience to be able to apply to electric utilities and specifically rural electric cooperative. So, the journey has been very, very interesting. I wouldn’t trade it for any other journey.  

LM: Tell us a bit more about the National Electric Cooperative Association. I imagine some folks may not be familiar with it, so if you don’t mind, explain what the association is and its mission.  

VB: So, there are three types of electric utilities in the US. One is the investor-owned utilities—“the big ones” as we call them. You may be familiar with some of them, Pacific Gas and Electric, or Southern California Edison, or National Grid, or Dominion Energy, and a bunch of others.  

The second kind are what we call the “municipal utilities.” Most of them are small. There are about 2000 of them in the country. The more famous ones are Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which serves the city of Los Angeles, San Antonio as a utility, city of Austin as a utility, and so on. There are a bunch of small ones across the country. 

The third kind is the electric cooperatives, rural electric cooperatives. The investor-owned utilities are for-profit. Most of them are listed on the stock exchange as a company and they have a rate of return guaranteed and they make money for the shareholders while providing the electric service.  

The municipalities are governed by the local governments. For example, LA—the city of LA is governed by LADWP, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Similarly, for other cities, San Antonio and other places, they’re part of the government. So, it’s like the town provides water, gas, and electric service. Electric cooperatives on the other hand are not-for-profit organizations. Think of it as like a homeowner’s association, except that their job is to provide electricity to the community that they serve. Most of them are rural and they were established as part of the Rural Electrification Act that Franklin Roosevelt passed in the 1930s. The reason for that was, while the IOUs and the municipalities serve the densely populated areas, the big cities, small cities, and small towns, there wasn’t anyone to serve the municipalities, smaller populated areas in rural America with low density populations. Therefore, it did not make economic sense for utilities to come [to rural areas], but electricity is a necessity and was a need that needed to be filled. The Rural Electrification Act created the Rural Utility Service (RUS) under the US Department of Agriculture to provide low interest loans for rural areas that wanted to form a utility and supply electricity. So now, today, we have 900 rural electric cooperatives across the country.  

The NRECA, National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association, was formed in the 1940s to advocate for rural electric cooperatives to the federal officials, lawmakers and the congressmen and woman who serve the senators. So, that’s what we do. Under that, we do a lot of things including advocacy and applied research. We do research on behalf of our members, with our members, on a variety of topics that are important to our members. So, where I work, a department called Business and Technology strategies, BTS for short, we do applied research and develop tools and resources for a variety of areas: integrated grid planning operations, DER (distributed energy resources), cybersecurity, resource adequacy, transmission and distribution analytics, a variety of topics that are important and relevant to our members, the electric cooperatives.  

LM: There’s been a lot in the news lately about artificial intelligence and the exploding need for data centers. We know that increasingly, data centers are going into rural areas. I’m wondering how the data center boom is affecting your members?  

VB: Yes, so just to give a background on data centers, we have the internet today that’s carrying large amounts of data. Increasingly large amounts of data as we speak, and AI coming in, it’s only going to make the need for transmitting and consuming large amounts of data much more by orders of magnitude. So, there’s already a demand and AI will increase the demand for data even more. The data centers, what they do, is help in terms of acquiring, storing and transmitting data across the world through the internet.  

I would say that as the global community’s use of data increases, so does the need for data centers. So, what’s happening right now? There are a lot of data centers that are cropping up all over the country. There are two needs here for data centers, in terms of electricity. One is extremely reliable electricity and resilient electricity because they cannot afford to lose power because the data centers inside have thousands of servers. Computer service, you know they all run 24/7. If they stop, the data transmittal also stops, and the internet essentially can break down at least a portion of it. So, you do want them running 24/7.  

The second thing is the need for cooling. All of those servers inside the data center, when they operate, they generate a lot of heat. So, their biggest load apart from the servers is electricity, or even more, much more of that, is the HVAC load. Aside from that, they’re a pretty low maintenance facility in terms of the building and other infrastructure, but their need for consumption is great, they’re taking hundreds of megawatts per building. If it’s a large building, and if you multiply that number by the number of buildings, we’re quickly talking about many, many thousands of megawatts of power that’s needed.  

It’s a great thing to happen, however, you’ve got to plan for the infrastructure, to serve that load. And then, more importantly, you’ve got to plan for reliable power to supply that load. Because remember, they all require a reliable power supply, but there is a critical load like a hospital. So, they need reliable power. They do normally have backup power, obviously they have generators onsite. Those have triple redundant power supplies to make sure that power doesn’t fail. However, it is important for us to have a reliable power supply.  

There are pockets of the country, rural cooperatives, where they’re dealing with the data center load. They will continue to do so because the load is only growing and when AI comes in, and as it grows, the applications of AI grow and people are using more and more AI-based applications, you’re going to see a growth in data centers. For example, if you go to Google, and you search with AI, it takes 10 times more power consumption than without AI. So, imagine, multiply that by millions of Google searches completed and you quickly get an idea of the need and power consumption. So, it is good, and it can be dealt with when properly planned and executed.  

LM: Certainly. I know in your career that you’ve done a lot of work with solar forecasting and reliability. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the role of renewables in our society as we continue to progress.  

VB: Well, yes. Renewables. Based on electricity supplies growing and it’s poised to grow more, so there’s a lot more solar and wind and other forms of renewables but let’s take a step back here for a moment, right? The power grid right now has different attributes that are needed. One attribute is reliability, another is safety, and another is being affordable because it’s a necessity. And then, of course, we have other attributes coming in, which are cleaner with the renewables and things like that.  

It’s important to balance all of these attributes. It’s no use if I have absolutely reliable power, but then, it’s extremely expensive because nobody will use it or very few people. It’s no use having resilient, cleaner power, but it’s not safe, then we’ve got other problems. So, the balancing of these attributes is very, very important. Just to give you perspective, electric cooperatives, the rural electric cooperatives together serve 92% of counties in the country below the poverty line. We’re referencing people who are deep in poverty, but they also need electricity as much as others. So, those things are always in the mind of our members we serve. They look at different forms of energy, including renewables, existing ones and others, and balance to see how cost-effective a solution can be while they’re reducing pollution, improving environmental attributes, and continuing the reliability and resiliency and safety of power supply.  

That is a very challenging thing to do for sure. So, that is why we always look at how we can make sure that there are no policies that are averse to our members’ interests and our members are still left with choices on what is best for the community. Now, that is on the economic and the policy side of technology. When we get more and more renewable-based generation of the system, there are impacts technically to the grid in terms of reliability. We cannot control when the sun shines, nor can we control how much the wind blows, which means our fuel is simply less controllable now, which means the power that we get is intermittent and uncontrollable.  

I’m not saying we can’t do anything about it, but we need to be able to think of solutions on how we can assimilate in a sustainable, scalable way. So those are some of the challenges the industry is dealing with right now. And I also want to point out the cleanest power we have on the bulk scale is nuclear.  

You know, zero carbon, right? One of the renewables attributes is zero carbon. Nuclear is zero carbon. And when properly managed with waste disposal and so on, nuclear has excellent attributes of clean power. You know, there are no pollutants being emitted or anything of that sort, just water vapor.  

I guess the bottom line is, there’s no one size fits all, or there’s no one solution or one technology that’s going to be the silver bullet. It’s a conglomerate kind of that’s going to take us forward.  

LM: Absolutely. I was listening to a podcast the other day and they were talking about the use of hydrogen. Could you give some context around hydrogen? You mentioned nuclear is a clean fuel and I guess hydrogen, as I heard it described, is considered to be clean, right?  

VB: Yeah, I mentioned renewable hydrogen. There are different types of hydrogen, and this is recent. I knew hydrogen apparently has different colors, you know, there’s green hydrogen, which is hydrogen generated through renewable means, using renewable fuel. There is black or brown hydrogen, which is hydrogen generated through coal burning or other fossil fuels. And you have blue hydrogen, which is hydrogen generated from natural gas. So, maybe there are other colors that I don’t know, but as far as I know these are the ones now.  

The most abundant material in the universe is hydrogen, and it’s very simple in construction and in formation, and a very clean burning fuel. Now, it’s also the least dense gas. It’s got just one proton and one electron, so it’s not very dense. So, capturing, storing, avoiding leaks, and creating an infrastructure that can reliably acquire, transmit and store hydrogen is very important. It’s technically solvable, but cost-wise, it’s not cheap, it’s something we need to look at. The economic attractiveness of hydrogen at a larger scale has yet to be proven.  

Now, from a technology basis, we can split water, for example, electrolysis and generate hydrogen and then use that to burn it in gas turbines. And then, you know, no emissions, right? So minimal. And then you have a clean burning fuel, very high BTU, very high energy fuel. Hydrogen has very high energy. All of those are good, but there’s still the question of cost. That problem hasn’t been solved yet. As is the problem of generating and storing at a large scale. Infrastructure pipelines have to be really, really leak proof because of low density so you cannot really use natural gas pipelines, for example, to transmit hydrogen because hydrogen is much less dense.  

You have to do a lot to it to be able to hold and transmit high pressures. Liquefied hydrogen, you can do that. Again, cost is an issue, it is. It’s certainly some fuel of the future, but it’s something that needs more work to be done before we can call it done and be able to use it.  

LM: Speaking of the future, again, you’ve been in this business for 30 years, and you mentioned you’re doing a lot of research in your current roles. Beyond what we’ve already discussed, what do you see as future trends in our country around power generation and usage?  

VB: Let me talk about the usage part first. And this is a future trend. What’s coming down the pike is something that I deal with every hour of every day. I know that’s part of my job to look at it. We are more as a society certainly dependent on electricity than ever before. Because electrification is happening in multiple ways, we talked about new loads such as data centers and add it to crypto mining. And, you know, with a chuckle I can say grow farms, you know, marijuana and other farms, you don’t discount them. They are a load that’s there. As most states legalize, you get more people growing and that requires a lot of heating and lighting and load, which is not trivial. Anyway, we’ve got these new loads. The other ones are electrification of existing loads, such as heating, you say heat by propane or natural gas, you know, they convert electricity through heat pumps or otherwise. So, that electrification of existing loads, and then you have other loads that are coming through manufacturing of new technologies that are established in the US, EVs for example, all those things. So, you have manufacturing load coming in.  

You have a lot more online education, online healthcare, things like that, right? That’s a twin dependency on the internet, broadband connection, and of course, the associated electricity, right? Without that, you can’t have it. So, the dependency on electricity is increasing quite a bit. Now, that can be good news because electrification grows and utility businesses grow, and loads grow, and so on.  

However, it comes with challenges. First is the threat to the system, both humanmade and natural. Cybersecurity is huge. There are both nation states and individuals who are wanting to take pot shots at our electrical grid and try to do something to destabilize. You have to be on constant 24/7 alert on that physical security. Some people, for whatever reason, take pot shots with guns, unfortunately at substations. We had a few instances in the past few years, so there’s a need for physical security. Those are some of the things now on the natural side.  

We have hurricanes and snowstorms and everything else, which are coming faster, more ferocious, staying longer and dumping a lot of rain and snow on the ground. So, we have to prepare for resilience on both from humanmade and natural threats, so that is something that I see going on.  

So, how do you really plan and operate the grid? We talked a lot about the technology side, but I do see artificial intelligence, if used properly, as a game changer in every aspect but it has some time to go. There are more exciting Chat GPT type, low hanging fruit that’s there, but then beyond that, getting into actual control, operations, and planning it’s going to take some time. And then we need to really define what the value is. We are not quite there yet, but I think that is something that we are keeping an eye on. Beyond that, new technologies and energy storage is always something that’s evolving and it’s really looking at what new ways we can create a battery that is not dependent on raw materials that are coming from countries that are not so friendly to us, or strategically not quite in line with us.  

LM: Okay, good. Thank you. One last question. What advice do you have for young engineers interested in the power industry?  

VB: We work with a lot of universities and always are looking at engineers. The power grid industry is interesting. As I said, when we started, the fundamental principles of electricity haven’t changed. So, I would encourage young engineers, and I will take it to mean young power engineers, to be grounded in the fundamental principles. It’s easy nowadays to get distracted into more exotic fields such as AI or other computer-based things such as digitization. They’re all good and they should be specialized in that, but never leave the fundamental knowledge to be learned later or never skip being a subject matter expert in whatever field you choose to be that applies to everything. In this case, if you’re electrical engineering, it’s very important.  

That’s the first step. Then comes AI and then comes everything else on top of it, because I’ve seen too many where if they’re not strong in the fundamentals, then they don’t go very far in terms of professional fulfillment and personally. So, keep your focus on the fundamentals first, and then go towards more exotic things to focus on. The soft skills are something that’s extremely important presentation skills. I know this may seem trivial or mundane, but it’s one of the best. I also did an MBA just for fun after seven years at GE. One of the best courses I took was ethics and management or something like that. But the professor focused on how to create a PowerPoint, how to present it, your body language when you present, how you interact with the audience, and things like that. She actually made us videotape when we present and watch with us to critique it, which is brutal, but it taught me a lot. So, I would encourage engineers to spend a little bit of time doing that.  

As Venkat reflects on his varied career and the innovations transforming the energy landscape, it’s clear that adaptability and forward-thinking are essential in the sector. From advancing renewable technologies to ensuring rural cooperatives keep up with rising energy demands, the journey of the grid is far from over. With leaders like Venkat pushing boundaries, the future of energy is set to become smarter, more sustainable, and increasingly consumer focused.