| Tim O’Connor is a career operator. And operations at a utility, he said, used to be a sleepy gig. As the chief operations officer for Xcel Energy, O’Connor is charged with leading the utility to 80% carbon-free electricity supply by 2030, and 100% by 2050. Intermittent renewable energy will drive much of Xcel’s decarbonization push. That means 3,000 MW of intermittent resources can appear and disappear in a matter of minutes. What’s more, distributed energy resources (DERs), present a separate set of challenges. “I have to figure out how to make these things work even though the engineer side of me says ‘I don’t know how to do that yet,'” O’Connor said. “It takes a completely different kind of communication, a completely different type of connectivity.” For many of the largest utilities, like Xcel, private communications networks are seen as the key to “make these things work.” | 