SECURING NORTH AMERICA’S ENERGY GRID

While I was at the U.S. Digital Service, I lead a discovery sprint team with the Department of Energy. The purpose of a discovery sprint is to quickly explore a pressing agency challenge, partnering agency personnel with a small cross-functional team of USDS engineers, designers, and subject matter experts. By the end of the sprint, the team should have a clear understanding of the problem, recommendations for how to achieve agency goals, a suggested path forward, and potentially a team capable of assisting that effort.

My team worked with the Office of Electricity on NAERM - a resilience model that aims to map the North American energy grid end-to-end for energy planning and situational awareness.

UNDERSTAND

Over the course of two weeks, the team interviewed about 40 individuals involved with the project to get a sense of the problems they were facing. The three top items we learned were:

  • There are so many influences that impact our energy grid but everything is largely done independently with little coordination.

  • Project team members were spread across the organization, in different offices that had differing priorities.

  • There was a lot of energy expertise on the project, but limited expertise in building or developing digital products.

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OUTCOMES

The team presented their findings and recommendations to project leadership. Due to the nature of the project, I’m unable to share specific around the findings and our recommendations, but the NAERM team has used the result of the sprint to help prioritize their work and get the needed resources for the team.