What makes power-industry DX difficult, exactly
When we accompany DX engagements in the Japanese power industry, we encounter, again and again, the same wall.
It is the density of the industry's tacit knowledge.
The bidding rules of the JEPX wholesale market. The structure of takusou wheeling tariffs. The discipline of taking supply-and-demand balance in 30-minute settlement intervals. The simultaneous-equality regime of planned versus actual values. The economics of FIT and FIP for renewables. A web search will give you the outline of each — but how any of this is actually operated, in the field, is invisible from outside the field.
When an external consultancy proposes "DX for the industry", the most common failure is skipping over this tacit knowledge and designing technology-first.
Le Lieu — reading the power industry as a place
The Le Lieu (place, singular conditions) of which we speak in our terroir method takes, in the case of the power industry, the following layered form:
- Regulatory layer — the Electricity Business Act, the wheeling tariff terms, the JEPX trading rules
- Physical layer — 30-minute simultaneous balance, area-level supply-demand, grid-connection constraints
- Trading layer — the spot market, the intraday market, the capacity market, the ancillary-services balancing market
- Customer layer — high-voltage and low-voltage contracts, switching dynamics, the obtainability of consumption data
Misread this stratum, and however loudly one shouts "real-time forecasting on the cloud!", the implementation will not land in the field of the business.
La Culture — the organizational culture of utilities
Power utilities carry a distinctive organizational culture.
- A high orientation toward conservatism — "do not cause an outage" is the absolute first priority; decisions are deliberate
- Pronounced functional silos — even after the unbundling of generation, transmission-distribution, and retail, operational walls persist
- The weight of the ringi approval flow — even decisions at the scale of several million yen pass through multiple layers
This is not a "bad culture". It is a culture rationally suited to the responsibility of operating social infrastructure. Rather than pressing the customer's organization to decide faster, we design our proposal documents — informed by industry experience — to align with the natural choreography of the ringi flow.
Les Gens — the engineers and operators of the field
And finally, the engineers and operators in the field.
The system operations of the power industry are sustained by people who have spent careers under the unrelenting pressure of "do not, under any circumstances, cause an outage". They can appear skeptical of new technology, and that skepticism is not laziness — it is the rightful caution of those who carry work that cannot afford to fail.
We treat these people as the protagonists of the project. Our role is not to "teach" them a new system; it is to walk alongside, to draw out their tacit knowledge, and to weave that knowledge into the digital fabric.
Implementation example — a generation-forecasting system
Consider, for example, a generation-forecasting system of the kind we have accompanied. Written as a single line, it is "a system that forecasts generation output from weather data and historical generation". Implemented in earnest, it carries the following layers:
- Physical model — weather → output conversion (different formulations for solar versus wind)
- Statistical model — error correction against historical actuals
- Operations interface — translation into a bidding plan that satisfies 30-minute simultaneous balance
- Recovery on error — adjustment processes through the spot and intraday markets
The last two of these are not in any system-engineering textbook. The tacit knowledge of the field engineers is drawn out, and woven into the system. That, in our view, is the essence of "industry-specific systems engineering".
The DX of not hurrying DX
What matters in industry-specific DX is dialogue with industry culture. What we should hurry is not the introduction of technology, but the expression of respect for the culture itself.
This may sound like a contradiction. In practice, DX that has honored industry culture is, in the end, the DX that lands fastest — this is the empirical pattern we have verified, and re-verified, in the field.
The enterprise terroir method becomes, for designing this kind of "DX with respect", an exceptionally practical instrument.
Read more about the BizDev practice of Sun&R.Lab here.
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Auteur · Author
Mitsuhiro NakayamaFounder & CEO, Sun&R.Lab LLC.