There are a large number of consulting services providers to Operations and Engineering staffs in the electric power industry. In North America, Tier One providers include the Structure Group business unit within Accenture, KEMA DNV GL, QUANTA-Technology, PE (Power Engineers), PSC, SISCO, UISOL and others. Several of these firms have their origins as T&D engineering consultants, somewhat akin to the expertise found at the very large firms such as Black & Veatch, Burns & McDonnell, Bechtel and others.
Since the turn of the century and the development of grid modernization studies extending to OT/IT integration, and to enterprise-wide consulting services, a number of additional consulting specialists such as Enernex, Nexant, Bridge Energy, Navigant are highly visible and competing with the more “traditional” OT consulting community.
Additional firms are also active in related segments of grid modernization activities including telecommunications specialist firms (UTCG, PWI, Boreas, Telcordia (part of Ericsson), PSI, and carriers); Cyber consulting specialists (Tripwire, Industrial Defender (now owned by Lockheed Martin), Waterfall Security Solutions, IPKeys, Network & Security Technologies, N-Dimension and Securicon) and market management specialists (OATI, PA, Scott-Madden).
The survey conducted during the fourth quarter of 2015 was concerned in part with the perceived changes taking place among the consulting community that serves operational technology needs of electric utilities.
Some of the summary highlights of one study include these observations
Three of five key integrators of control systems look upon OT specialist consultants as “fair and impartial” while two suggested that consultants have their favorites among the systems provider community.
Integrator officials also provided their thoughts on the future role for OT consultants as follows:
- Niche players will increase due to that the DER penetration will drive new regulation and requirement for ADMS (distribution)
- Difficult to say with certainty, but I don’t think the consultant roles will change much.
- I believe consultants will be supporting more and more project implementation for the end customer as the key internal knowledgeable resources are become less available.
- To be a trusted partner to a utility to help guide them, but not make decisions on their behalf or to further benefit from those decisions. The role of being part of a procurement (RFP/RFI) process and then to provide system integration services for the selected bidder is raising major ethics concerns.
- I don’t think much will change over the next 4 years.
summary reviews and highlights from completed studies
