Marty Adams’ arsenal of new tech and time-tested tools are powering his city’s energy transformation.
Here’s a quiz. You’re in charge of one of the largest, most challenging municipal utilities in a part of the world that’s on the frontlines of extreme weather. And your aim is to make the system reliable, resilient and, here’s the kicker, renewable in less than 10 years. Do you:
a.) Use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict water and power usage and spot equipment failures before they happen?
b.) Install giant lithium-ion batteries in the Mojave Desert to power almost 300,000 homes?
c.) Develop wind energy to help power the city while removing the equivalent of 100,000 cars’ worth of carbon from the system?
d.) Stick to tried-and-true tech, like hydropower?
For Marty Adams, general manager and chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the answer is all of the above. Forty years at LADWP has armed Adams with a unique understanding of the tools at his disposal and how to deploy them—from the latest innovative technology to human know-how. To reach the unprecedented goal to make the utility 80% renewable in less than a decade, a healthy dose of optimism helps, too.
“If you don’t set some lofty goals, you won’t get anywhere,” he says.
Among the groundbreaking innovations at his command is AI-powered predictive analysis and forecasting, which digests troves of data to manage water and power more efficiently. The technology also helps spot problems, such as equipment failures or pipeline leaks, before they arise. AI makes all the power resources that are plugged together work much more efficiently and allows us to drive the amount of renewable energy up substantially, says Adams, who is tasked with tackling increasing power and water demands, along with a call for greater environmental stewardship. “This conserves resources while improving reliability for our customers, which is really the name of the game.”
AI is not the only trailblazing tool bringing greener energy to the citizens of Los Angeles. The Eland Solar and Battery Storage project—one of the world’s largest and most cost-effective initiatives of its kind—allows LADWP to access electricity from solar panels and lithium-ion batteries in the Mojave Desert. When finished in 2025, the project is expected to support 6% to 7% of Los Angeles’ energy needs. It’s enough to power almost 300,000 homes, says Adams of the storage system priced at 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour—a record low for this type of contract.
Less new, but equally as effective at scale, is the company’s New Mexico-based Red Cloud Wind Farm, a complex of turbines providing around 331 megawatts of energy to LA. Annually, the high-capacity, low-cost project saves approximately a half million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere, the equivalent of keeping roughly 100,000 cars off the road.
Adams is quick to note that despite the digital transformation he’s seen over the past four decades, the role of tried-and-true tech, such as hydropower, cannot be overlooked. "There's been rolling blackouts in California and energy shortages. LA has not been part of that,” he explains. “LA has actually put power back on the grid to save other communities. And we've done that because we've been very careful not to throw away infrastructure and assets that have proven reliable over and over, like the Castaic Power Plant that has been part of our system for 50 years.”
Equally important, he says, is human expertise: "You can't replace walking into a facility and smelling something that smells like burned oil or noticing that a sound isn't what it sounded like last week.”
Through this combination of emerging technology, proven innovations and human ingenuity, Adams is confident that LADWP will transform the future of his beloved hometown. “Climate change has been a wake-up call for greater sustainability and resiliency—not only for the planet, but also to become more resilient as a city, no matter what the weather does,” he says. “What could be more important right now than that?”
