The villain of climate change is fossil fuels – and the oil giants who covered up what they knew about the long-term impacts of their revenue-generating activities. And as the recent UN COP28 reaffirmed, continued fossil fuel dependence is the wrong move.

By moving away from a career in oil and gas, Intel’s Mike Bates similarly represents the manner in which perspectives on energy are shifting on a broader scale.

After 13 years of unlocking “a lot of carbon” with his “own hands” at oil services company Baker Hughes, he shifted to work on “what is now called the energy transition,” he told SDxCentral. Nowadays, Bates leads Intel’s Energy Center of Excellence.

His current work is focused on applying Intel technologies to the transition from carbon-intensive fossil fuel systems to a cleaner, distributed and resilient energy grid while taking advantage of Intel’s decades-strong ecosystem. This is an endeavor in which “we think we’re uniquely positioned,” Bates said.

To that point, Intel recently announced its participation in the Edge for Smart Secondary Substations (E4S) Alliance in a collaborative effort to bring about a distributed, renewable energy grid.

In addition to grid modernization that allows for “unlimited amounts of renewable energy to be integrated into the grid,” Intel’s energy team is focused on industrial decarbonization, EV charging at retail locations and private grids for energy sovereignty and climate resiliency, according to Bates.

The edge of the energy grid

Grid decarbonization takes more than the addition of renewable energy sources like solar, wind or battery power. On the distribution side of the grid, or at the edge, “the technology capabilities don’t exist to be able to optimize and balance all that new load,” Bates said. In other words, “the new grid that we're moving to is almost turning the [old] grid upside down.”

As part of E4S, Intel is pioneering a software-defined approach to energy grids by building small-scale data centers inside electrical substations – the central inflection points for delivering electricity.

Gone are the rows of old, proprietary electrical and mechanical equipment in grid substations. In come server racks.

The nature of edge computing allows for the latency needed to make real-time decisions on how to balance the available grid resources with current demand. “Once we move that compute to the far edge, we're able to deploy applications that allow for real-time balancing,” Bates said.

Furthermore, this substation modernization helps avoid backhaul costs for energy availability and demand data that’s collected at the edge.

By leveraging the technology adoption curve, Intel is approaching its ecosystem of utilities, electric vehicle (EV) charging vendors and fleet owners, for example, to drive these software-defined efforts at scale.

Intel tech at work

Specifically, Intel is involved with real-time syncing of grid conditions, the integration of renewable energy sources and enhanced cybersecurity.

Intel’s virtualized software platform is able to detect faults and remediate them “before they happen,” Bates said. “That’s a new use case.”

The company is also involved with the integration of renewables, which is driving many of the efforts toward grid reengineering. “Being able to push compute allows you to see those loads and be able to integrate them into the market,” he said.

Intel’s software platform at the edge of the grid is also able to sense cybersecurity threats in ways substations are unable to do today, which represents a major enhancement for these common attack targets.

If history repeats itself, Big Oil could be on its way out

Bates described today’s energy transition as akin to the telecom restructuring of decades past.

“After the deregulation, it wasn't the Southwestern Bells of the world that made the money. It was the companies that used broadband infrastructure to create new services like Google and Microsoft,” he said. “That’s what is happening now in the utility space.”

Rather than fossil fuel giants suddenly shifting gears away from carbon-based energy, Bates expects new market entrants will end up as the major service providers in this space. And if he can go from enabling emissions during his day job to reimagining the edge of the grid for renewables, perhaps the rest of the sector isn’t too far behind.