Xcel Energy and Accenture: The World’s First SmartGridCity™

Most notably, they establish and maintain a robust market focus and position. They develop hard-to-replicate capabilities. And they build a strong performance anatomy, which describes the cultural and organizational mindsets that drive a business to outperform. Recent Accenture research suggests that sustainability is emerging as an important avenue through which companies can create these building blocks of high performance. Specifically, companies that integrate sustainability into their business models and product and service offerings may have an edge over their competitors when it comes to growing revenue, reducing costs, improving efficiencies, managing risks, and enhancing their brands and reputations.

Accenture assembled a team with expertise in a variety of areas—including management consulting, energy transmission and distribution, information management, customer relationship management, systems integration and technology consulting—to work with other consortium members to create a clear smart grid vision and an approach to deployment within the pilot city of Boulder, Colorado. In this four-month planning phase, Accenture played a major role in helping to define several key solution features, including automated energy distribution and customer interfaces.

With Accenture’s participation in the Smart Grid Consortium, Xcel Energy is well on its way to deploying the first SmartGridCity solution in the world. When the ground-breaking infrastructure is unveiled in 2009, it will demonstrate how innovative technologies can come together to provide a range of digital services desired by utility consumers, while also supporting the ever-increasing demand for energy. For example, the smart grid’s dynamic communications network and “smart” substations will provide real-time, two-way communication, which will, in turn, enable remote monitoring and optimized system performance. The introduction of thousands of in-home control devices will allow residential consumers to fully automate their energy use. And the integrated smart grid infrastructure will support a variety of fuel sources, including electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels. These sorts of advances are just the beginning. The smart gird is expected to support additional capabilities in the future that consumers, consortium members, and the industry cannot yet imagine.