I'm interested in knowing some more details regarding the architectural setup and organizational structure that would allow something like this to happen.
It was the small New England town I grew up in outside of Boston. Typically they manage their own power distribution, and purchase power from a utility at a rate fixed by the highest peak usage of the year, which tends to be 1:00 sometime in early August.
I was setting up a system to detect the peak usage and alert the attendant to send a fax (1992) to our local college generator plant to switch over some of their power to us, thus reducing our yearly power bill by a lot.
There was a title grabber in charge of the department, and a highly competent engineer running everything and keeping the crews going. That was my boss. Each summer I was doing new and crazy things, from house calls for bad TV signals from grounding to mapping out the entire grid. Oddly enough there was no documentation as to what house was on what circuit.. it was in the heads of the old linesman. Most of the time when they got a call about power outages they drove around looking at what houses were dark and what were not.
Sometimes the older linesmen would call me on the radio to meet them somewhere, and we'd end up in their back yards taking a break having some beers. I learned a lot from those old curmudgeonly linesmen. They made fun of me non stop, but always with a wink and roaring laughter. Especially when I cut power to half the town.
It's a hard space to break into. The businesses are conservative about any change, and new vendors are fairly un-trusted. Further, it is a bit different of a world than normal software realms, due to crazy long legacy lifetimes. Another problem is that the money isn't as big as you'd think, its a surprisingly small field.
All that being said, there is opportunity, just not easy opportunity. And a huge number of the people in it are boomers, so there is going to be big shake-ups in the next decade or two.
