ELECTRIC UTILITY CONSULTING
Grid Compass Energy connects market requirements with control-room reality—helping utilities prepare their processes, systems, and people for what comes next.
Explore our expertiseSTRATEGY GROUNDED IN OPERATIONS
New markets. Evolving responsibilities. Systems and teams that need to work together. Grid Compass Energy helps electric utilities translate complex requirements into practical decisions, clear processes, and prepared people.
Led by Alan Adams, the practice brings hands-on operational experience to the work of planning and delivering change.
OUR EXPERTISE
Focused support across the decisions, systems, and people that keep electricity moving.
Navigate wholesale market participation with a clear understanding of operational obligations, business impacts, and implementation priorities.
Connect reliability responsibilities to the operating model, procedures, and technology your organization needs to perform.
Move from requirements to repeatable execution with structured testing, practical training, and visible readiness criteria.
THE GRID COMPASS FRAMEWORK
Each market requirement needs an operating decision—and evidence that the organization can execute it.
What changes?
Rules · obligations · commercial impactsWho acts, and how?
Roles · decisions · systems · proceduresWhat proves readiness?
Scenarios · training · acceptance evidenceTesting findings feed back into operating processes and requirement interpretation.
OUR APPROACH
Good advice should hold up in a leadership meeting and on an operating shift.
Start with your objectives, obligations, and current capabilities. Identify the gaps and dependencies that matter most.
Translate requirements into decisions, responsibilities, and a prioritized plan that operations, technology, and leadership can act on.
Validate processes through testing and training. Track readiness, resolve open issues, and support the transition into daily operations.
SELECTED EXPERIENCE
Current advisory assignments and earlier market and utility work. Current examples describe work underway, not completed client outcomes.
MEET ALAN ADAMS
Grid Compass Energy is the electric utility consulting practice of ABT Enterprises LLC, Alan Adams’ wholly owned consulting business.
You work directly with Alan, from defining the assignment through delivery.
Alan brings more than 30 years of executive and operational leadership spanning grid operations, wholesale electricity markets, energy management systems, and organizational readiness. His perspective connects the demands of real-time operations with the decisions required to implement lasting change.
Alan began in transmission engineering and energy auditing at Dayton Power & Light, then led distribution, balancing authority, and transmission and generation operations. At MISO he worked in reliability coordination, real-time markets, and ancillary-services implementation. Consulting assignments later spanned PJM dispatch applications, ERCOT nodal-market readiness, NYISO market-to-market coordination, SPP market launch, a cooperative utility’s EMS modernization, and a utility’s NERC CIP program.
Current work includes SPP RTO expansion stabilization, balancing authority capability and responsibility assessments, and operations preparation for Markets+. Alan helps clients connect market rules and commercial choices to control-room decisions, technology requirements, training, testing, and evidence of readiness.
PRACTITIONER INSIGHTS
Practical perspectives on the work between a strategic decision and a prepared organization.
READINESS / 3 MIN READ
Replace percentage-complete confidence with evidence from real operating scenarios.
Read the perspectiveOPERATING MODEL / 3 MIN READ
Why responsibilities, handoffs, and authority should come before a list of tools.
Read the perspectiveMARKET INTEGRATION / 3 MIN READ
A practical way to connect a requirement to an owner, a procedure, and a test.
Read the perspectiveLET’S TALK
Discuss your market transition, operational challenge, or implementation priorities directly with Alan.