In this episode of Energy Insight, Daniel Engelman, Vice President of Ubicquia, shares his thoughts on the challenges of ensuring reliability at the edge of the grid through transformer and EV-charging monitoring. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
SGO
For listeners who might not be familiar, could you briefly describe the kind of work you do in this field?
Daniel
Ubicquia provides sensors on infrastructure that traditionally has not been intelligent. That includes street lights, transformers, and moving into the EV charging market.
SGO
Late last year, Ubicquia announced a rollout of some major expansions and now you’re going into more broad operational support. How do you feel like that mirrors the way grid management as a whole is changing?
Daniel
One of the biggest drivers behind our platform expansion is the realization that some of the most critical assets on the grid are also the least visible. Transformers are a perfect example of that: historically, they’ve been managed on a run-to-failure basis. They sit right at the edge of the grid. They take a lot of stress, and utilities don’t usually have direct telemetry on them. And because of that, you don’t often know there’s a problem until something trips, overheats, or fails. But now the edge of the grid is where issues show up first -- voltage irregularities, thermal stress, and of course, power quality events. And by putting eyes and intelligence directly on those transformers, we help utilities move from reactive operations to a real-time understanding of asset health, and that’s a fundamental shift. For EV charging operators, many have already solved the easy reliability problems. Getting them to 95 or even 97% uptime is totally achievable, but the hard part is that last few percentage points. And that’s where poor upstream power quality creates those unexplained failures, and transformer-level visibility turns blind spots into actionable insights.
SGO
We hear about EV charging specifically as a growing grid driver. Have you noticed that impact in your work today compared to a few years ago?
Daniel
Definitely. A few years ago, EV charging was largely a planning conversation. Utilities were modeling future demand and adoption curves, but today that’s changed and EVcharging is very much no longer theoretical. It’s operational, and we’re seeing real stress on specific transformers, specific feeders, specific circuits, and it’s happening in very localized ways. This isn’t an aggregate grid problem, it’s an asset-level problem. And certain pieces of infrastructure are getting hit much harder than others, especially around fast-charging sites. For operators, this shows up as reliability issues that are harder to explain. So, a site can look fine on paper, but uptime still suffers because the upstream power isn’t as clean or as stable as assumed. And that’s why our focus has shifted from planning for the future to diagnosing and managing what’s happening right now.
SGO
Ubicquia has a distinct approach from a fully turnkey system. By design, you set out to preserve more customer agency. Can you tell us a little bit about how you help customers manage all that data that they gather effectively? Is that a challenge?
Daniel
Yes. One of the things we’re very intentional about is recognizing that data by itself doesn’t create value, decisions do. So we give customers access to the data coming off of our sensors and we pair that data with analytics and AI that turns signals into actionable insights, where the goal is to help customers understand what matters without forcing them to become data experts. And that means continuously monitoring asset behavior, looking for patterns that indicate stress, degradation, or abnormal conditions in general. So when something crosses over a meaningful threshold, we alert customers in real time. And then over time, we can predict when an asset is likely to become a problem before it fails. And throughout all of that, the customers stay in control. So our role is simply to help them act with confidence instead of reacting after the fact.
SGO
Was there a time you can think of when you actually chose to make a product or a system more simple, even when a customer wanted more?
Daniel
Yeah; a good example of choosing simplicity is how we’ve approached public safety and EV charging vandalism, particularly copper theft, which is a widespread problem. The impact of it on uptime and operating costs is significant, and what customers consistently tell us is that it’s not that they want more technology, they just want the problem to stop. So we made a deliberate decision not to build a traditional CCTV surveillance system. Instead, we focused on detecting the event itself. Using AI and edge processing, we can recognize the signatures of copper theft or vandalism as it’s happening and then alert immediately. When that’s combined with LPR -- license plate recognition -- and integration with law enforcement workflows, it becomes an active prevention and response solution. So customers don’t manage video, they get alerted and then they can act quickly.
SGO
Without getting into anything customer confidential, were there any insights from the field data that surprised you at all? Times when you learned something about usage patterns or demand that changed the way Ubicquia developed?
Daniel
Yes; one thing that genuinely surprised us was how often what looked like a charger failure wasn’t a charger problem at all. In many cases the root cause was upstream power quality, things like voltage sags, harmonics, or transient events. And once you can see those conditions in waveforms and event data, the mystery goes away. That insight pushed us to focus less on device-level monitoring and more on understanding what’s happening across the system.
SGO
And as Ubicquia’s scope expands, how do you decide what Ubicquia should own end-to-end vs. things that make more sense to provide through integrated modules or partnerships?
Daniel
The way we draw the line is pretty clear: we own the edge, the telemetry and the analytics. That’s our core. And that’s where reliability and data quality and trust really matter most. In areas where the ecosystem is already mature -- like video management, license plate recognition, public safety platforms -- integration makes much more sense in those situations than rebuilding. That gives customers flexibility and best-of-breed tools and it lets us stay focused on outcomes across power and operations.
SGO
Do you anticipate the smart city and utility market, going towards centralized platforms? Or do you think it’ll be more of a federated system with a lot of interoperable services? Where do you think Ubicquia will fit into that?
Daniel
What we are seeing is a move towards federated systems, not a single centralized platform. But federation doesn’t mean fragmentation. What operators really need is interoperability; systems that can share data and support coordinated decision. And Ubicquia fits well as an intelligence layer at the edge, because we make data trustworthy, easy to integrate into existing operational environments, and we’re not replacing enterprise platforms, we’re connecting edge assets to them.
SGO
Do you have any final thoughts on what to expect in 2026? Anything we can look forward to?
Daniel
What I think we’ll see in 2026 is a shift from experimentation to operational maturity. So for utilities and cities, that means moving from pilots to standard practice. And for EV charging operators, it means fewer unknowns, more predictable uptime, so that customers -- they’re increasingly focused on outcomes, reliability, safety, return on their investment. So from our perspective that’s very exciting. It’s where edge intelligence starts delivering everyday value at scale. So opportunity isn’t about doing something radically new, it’s about doing the fundamentals better and with confidence.
Daniel Engelman will be speaking in the session “Beyond the Charger, How Grid Conditions Impact EVSC Reliability” at SGO’s EV Charging and Infrastructure Summit, North America West, February 24th to 25th in San Francisco. For information and to register, visit www.ev-charging-summit-na.com
