The 2023 ARC Industry Forum - Peter Manos & Jim Frazer Wrap-Up of the 27th Annual Event

Peter Manos & Jim Frazer Wrap-Up of the 2023 ARC Industry Forum

Listeners to this episode will explore:

• Decarbonization, of the electric sector and oil and gas. 
•  Net zero and circular economy goals. 
•  Sustainability Resiliency and the energy transition.
•  How solution providers  are delivering value

Jim and Peter also focused on a number of fascinating speakers at the Forum including:

Alejandro Burgana from OBE power, who spoke about his network, the second largest network of EV chargers in Florida after Tesla, that, frankly offer a cost solution that's far below the cost of any other provider in terms of cents per kilowatt hour. 

 Milton Kramer who spoke about port electrification of all of the forklifts and the little vehicles that move containers around the port, about the electrification of ship side of shoreside power for the ships themselves, about electric tugboats.

 Curt Ostrodka, VHB engineering, talked about the federal funding programs how to get the funding and how to manage that  stakeholder requirements 

 And Glen Cook, who covered a range of different very exciting initiatives in Central Florida, about autonomous vehicles, vehicle electrification, and more specifically, the developing hub of technology in the Lake Nona area

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Transcript

Jim Frazer

And, Peter, let me just jump right in and ask you what are your what's your perception of the 27th Annual ARC Industry Forum this year, 

Peter Manos  

It's the energy level and the exchange of valuable ideas that have been thrilling. 

And, as you know, the solution providers have communicated great visions and great capabilities and are delivering value based on those. 

And yet there's also a set of challenges that the end user communities are trying to meet. And there's always going to be a gap between where we are and where we want to get to as far as being a solution provider and leveraging all the value among the user community. 

So Keeping It Real, is a great theme in virtually all the sessions that I was in - both the ones that I conducted, as well as ones I attended from other ARC analysts. 

Jim Frazer

So let's drill down into that in a little more detail. What sessions did you like? Which ones stand out in your mind this year? 

Peter Manos  

Well, my Get Ready for Sustainability Reporting session was a lot of valuable information and a lot of fun. 

And my second session, which was on Analytics and Asset Performance, had a very animated question and answer period after some great presentations from the end users.  

The sessions I sat in where Rick Rys moderated were fascinating. Rick had sessions on decarbonization, both of the electric sector and oil and gas. It was a tough topic that Rick took on, and was just very high quality attendees in there for addressing and sharing ideas about some tough issues on that path. 

I think a theme across those and other sessions for me is that the ideals of digital transformation of arriving at those future, decarbonization goals and net zero goals and circular economy goals. 

Those are ideals and like all human activity, we're imperfectly trying to reach that ideal. The drive to not give up and to surmount gaps is energizing. And we never know how we get from here to there. It's always seems impossible, right, Jim? but we do get there as human beings. 

And the other theme, the good old threefold, Technology, People Process, I saw these three weaving together in ways that were just beautiful. It's inspiring and also energizing as I said, to say, how are we going to meet these challenges? You know, that famous saying, it always seems impossible until it's done. You know, that's what lies before us. And I think the community we built here and are growing here is helping to address that. 

Jim Frazer  

You know, one of the sections that really resonated with me was one on electric vehicles, and more generally, it really was about electrification. And we had speakers from such a variety of different viewpoints. One, Milton Kramer spoke about port electrification of all of the forklifts and the little vehicles that move containers around the port, about the electrification of ship side of shoreside power for the ships themselves, about electric tugboats. For example, electrification of the reefers themselves that that how's our refrigerated produce that may come from other places? We had a great speaker, Curtis Estrada from VHB engineering, who talked about the federal funding programs ---- how to get the funding  and how to manage the requirements of us dot and serving underutilized economically challenged communities with electric vehicle chargers, for example. We had Alejandro Burgana from OBE power, who spoke about his network, the second largest network of EV chargers in Florida after Tesla, that, frankly offer a cost solution that's far below the cost of any other provider in terms of cents per kilowatt hour. And last but not least, we had a tremendous speaker, Glen Cook, who covered a range of different very exciting initiatives in Central Florida, about autonomous vehicles, vehicle electrification, and actually, the developing hub of technology in the Lake Nona area, ---- that session was just incredibly insightful. And even as the moderator of that session, I learned an awful lot from every single speaker. One the other that really resonates with me, was a more general session on sustainability, resilience, and the energy transition. And it was a first in the ARC forum history, as I understand that, we had four speakers, all of which were women. I attended that session, I was very inspired by the range there of capabilities, helicopter and drone inspections from one of the presenters, another presenter on modeling and better enabling you need municipalities to manage floodplain and water infrastructure. 

Peter Manos  

I think a theme in the EV. And in those areas, and in the areas that I presented, and also other sessions I attended a major theme is that advanced analytics and machine learning and other industrial automation, digital transformation capabilities, that data is so critical. And along with it, the ability to enable end users to visualize and use the insights from those tools. A word that came up in a presentation from Malik Patel of Dow, in my analytics and asset performance management session was the word was intuition. You're making something intuitive for the end users. And you realize that it's not just about having a capability to crunch numbers and get an insight, you know, like, because in the past, you might have been using Excel or querying a database, and it was slow, and, and the minutes or even anything that wasn't immediate. It doesn't feed a human beings intuition. But now with these visualization tools, that immediacy, that intuition is becoming an extension of our senses. Right. And it's becoming an extension of our innate ability to, to gain insights. And that's just thrilling to me.