Editor’s Note: At DISTRIBUTECH 2025, we interviewed successful thought leaders who help define what the energy transition is all about and where the power systems industry is heading. This is an excerpt from an interview with GE Vernova’s Chief Innovation Officer, Claudia Cosoreanu and GridBeatsTM Product Portfolio Executive, Marco Simiano.
The full interview can be accessed at www.powersystems.technology.
Alan Ross: Claudia, since our interview last year at DISTRIBUTECH 2024, what has been happening at GE Vernova?
Claudia Cosoreanu: As you know, we went public as a company last year, and it has been very successful. We are almost a year into it and there is still a lot of buzz in the industry around GE Vernova. The strategy resonates with our customers, which is to decarbonize and electrify the world. And as you know, we do have the right portfolio to do that. With the generation businesses – gas, nuclear, and steam – they make a good portfolio for the stability of the grid. We have the renewables with wind and solar and storage, which is also contributing to decarbonization. And we also have the electrification business and automation is part of electrification. GridBeatsTM, which Marco leads, is our automation solution. What we have been doing is really engaging with a lot of customers to see: does it resonate? Is everything that we are doing aligned with their goals? And we’re getting a lot of “yes” answers.
Alan Ross: Right now, utilities have a lot of different data sensors from a lot of different players. Can GridBeatsTM take data from anywhere, from any sensor?
Claudia: Yes. We are planning to have this as a vendor-agnostic solution. GridBeatsTM has five areas that we are focusing on: Digital Substations, Asset Management, Substation Monitoring, Autonomous Distribution, and Cybersecurity. What we are focusing on for customers and what is important right now for them is fast deployment. With the increase in demand, they just cannot keep up. The more we can help them standardize and get the substations completed faster, the better. So that is one outcome. Flexibility is the second one. Flexibility in the sense that today if they need to upgrade what they have in the in-stalled base, it takes an enormous amount of money and resources. We are designing our Grid-BeatsTM portfolio to be flexible, so that if in a few years they need to upgrade, which they will be-cause the network is changing so fast, they will be able to do it very fast with minimum costs.
Alan Ross: Marco, it seems that GridBeatsTM is a way to design things today that you know might change in the future, but you are not yet sure what those future changes will be. Is that a good assumption?
Marco Simiano: I think, Alan, that this is a very important point. GridBeatsTM addresses that, and I will give an example of Digital Substations. Today customers are making some decisions in terms of investing, and they want to build new assets, new substations to connect to data centers or wherever. Now the challenge is that the solutions or decisions made today, might not necessarily be true in two, three years’ time. We come from a time where substations and the grid were built and they were operating the same way for 20, 30, 40 years. That time is gone. Whatever we decide today might be valid for two, three years, but in four years, the dynamic might be different. The customer investment needs to be a future-proof solution which has the flexibility to pivot to something different. And that is why we advocate Digital Substations as a real flexible solution which can be pivoted to something different, can change the configuration very easily, change the layouts of the overall control schemes much, much easier – if in three, four years the energy flow changes because the ecosystem is changing.
Alan Ross: Claudia, when you say GridBeatsTM helps customers with resilience, what does that mean?
Claudia: It means you have a solution for a system that is designed to monitor the network, break it down into smaller networks, and can control that network on its own, disconnected from the rest of the grid. Let us assume that there is a hurricane and the grid goes down. Our Zonal Autonomous Control, which is part of GridBeatsTM, will be able to take control over the network that it is responsible for and bring that up to normal operating conditions as fast as possible, because it has the means to do so disconnected from the rest of the network.
Alan Ross: Like an AI data center, which is going to need power?
Claudia: Exactly, and to do that, we are utilizing AI technology. AI technology will be embedded in this autonomous distribution, or zonal autonomous control, to know exactly what is going on, to predict how the load is going to behave, and then to bring it all back to normal.
Alan Ross: It sounds like what you are building is a system that will work today, and also be a system that can support the customer for the long run, regardless of what happens, right?
Claudia: Yes, that is why we do like to call it future-proof. Whatever comes, we will be ready to support our customers.
Alan Ross: Claudia, as always, it has been a pleasure. Thank you.
Claudia: The same here, Alan. Thank you so much.
