Utility Field Operations 2030: Operational Friction is the Grid’s Hidden Weak Point

The utility sector is fighting a war on two fronts. On one side is the increasing demand for energy against power grid infrastructure that is being stretched to do more than ever. On the other is the rapidly changing utilities workforce. These pressures are rapidly converging – growing in severity and complexity – and reshaping what it takes to operate a resilient grid.

The American Society of Civil Engineers recently graded the U.S. energy sector as a D+, citing several factors including transformer shortages, severe weather exposure, and tightening capacity constraints as mounting vulnerabilities ¹. Utilities worldwide are encountering comparable challenges as they rely on aging infrastructure to meet contemporary and emerging load demands.  Extreme weather alone now accounts for roughly 80% of major outages, nearly double the rate observed in the early 2000s ².

At the same time, utilities must navigate how a smaller, generationally diverse workforce can address a rising backlog of field work. Even as energy-sector employment grows in aggregate, the International Energy Agency reports a widening skills gap: more than half of energy firms report critical labor shortages. 3 In developed economies, 2.4 experienced workers are nearing retirement for every new entrant under age 25 ³. As frontline experience grows more varied, current workloads are stretching beyond what conventional tools, systems, and processes can handle.

Utilities now must also confront a third challenge – one that often remains hidden: the operational friction embedded in field work.

1. Decision latency
   The time lost waiting for information, searching through documentation, resolving inconsistencies, or interpreting ambiguous instructions before crews can act.
2. Lagging Insights
    When crews lack predictive insights to spot issues early, work is re‑prioritized, and planned projects are delayed or pushed off course. On the ground, this manifests in a well-known metric: windshield time. Crews experience more hours consumed driving between job sites, navigating unexpected hazards, rerouting around access restrictions, or backtracking due to inaccurate or incomplete work planning.
3. Digital tax
   The burden imposed when work crews must juggle multiple, siloed digital tools that do not share data, workflows, or context, forcing workers to re-enter information, toggle apps, and manually reconcile systems.

Individually, each of these can chip away at productivity. Together, they compound to create an invisible, yet impactful, drag on field performance that every field team feels. In an environment defined by infrastructure strain and workforce scarcity, eliminating operational friction becomes a strategic differentiator.

Utilities rarely witness operational friction directly. Instead, they see its symptoms:

• Missing maintenance cycles
• Rising operations and maintenance (O&M) costs
• Slower restoration
• Declining reliability metrics
• Expanding backlogs
• Sinking safety key performance indicators

Meanwhile, in the field, technicians see and feel this friction daily. Critical wrench time is stolen by:

• Unanticipated field conditions, including environmental hazards, access restrictions, traffic disruptions
• Switching between multiple field apps
• Ambiguous or incomplete work instructions
• Time for callbacks, clarifications, or approvals
• Unnecessary driving
• Repetitive or manual data entry
• (Again) switching between disconnected digital tools

On a blue-sky day, these delays erode productivity. In gray skies, they become reliability and safety risks. At scale, latency compounds into systemic operational and financial drag.

The workforce shortage and experience gaps magnifies these issues. As veteran workers retire faster than utilities can replace them ³, decades of institutional knowledge disappear. Not every practice is written down, and even seemingly small efficiency repeated across thousands of work orders becomes hundreds of hours each year.

The most significant gains in field productivity will come from reducing friction and enabling crews to work unencumbered.

A new operating model for field work is emerging, one designed to reduce decision latency and improve frontline execution. It is built around three design principles.

1. Context at the Point of Work
This is the difference between information and insight.

A shared digital workspace closes the gap between dispatch and field crews by making delays, barriers, and learnings instantly visible. Nuanced field conditions, hidden hazards, institutional knowledge, and asset-specific behaviors are made clear and actionable directly within the workflow.  

This is particularly valuable for newer workers, who are largely digital natives, in accelerating ramp-up time and improving confidence and safety.

Context is enhanced by timely data streams. Weather intelligence, wildfire behavior, remote sensing insights, as-operated network model data can be made available directly into the task view to answer the next question. With extreme weather now driving most outages ², situational awareness is essential. 

2. Optimized Scheduling and Work Allocation
Industries have long pursued scheduling optimization, but the bar rises with every new source of data stream or additional metric. Today, real-time insights into weather, traffic, crew and inventory availability, and asset conditions can dramatically improve accuracy and efficiency of scheduling decisions.

Tomorrow, optimization will increasingly draw from deep frontline performance insights that can be drawn into the workstream to drive continuous improvements:

• Which crews excel at which tasks—what are they doing right that other teams can learn from?
• Who performs best together—what dynamics can be applied to other crews?
• What factors consistently hinder or enhance crew performance and how can those be minimized?
  
  Much of this knowledge currently lives only in the memory of experienced dispatchers.
  
  Formalizing it – capturing it today within a digital system – rapidly informs optimization engines to make better decisions, faster, with greater accuracy. 
  
  

3. Field-First Usability
For field crews, usability is not a luxury. It is a safety issue.

Digital tools must have intuitive interfaces that are easy to learn and navigate to reduce, not increase, cognitive load. Poorly designed applications force workers to stop, tap, scroll, and retype in moments when attention should be on situational hazards. 

Next-generation digital field solutions provide:

• Simple, low-friction interactions
• Easy to access safety briefings and diagrams
• Automated documentation
• Intelligent prompts to access institutional knowledge in real time
• AI-driven, hands-free “walk-and-talk” workflows reduce cognitive load and eliminate the need to stop, tap, scroll, or retype. 
  
  The true value of digital tools lies in how quickly crews can retrieve information, summarize complex data, and generate tasks with fewer errors and less operational risk. 

Modernizing field work is not just a technology initiative. It is an economic and regulatory imperative. Utilities that minimize operational friction benefit from:

• Regulatory Credibility
  Measurable improvements in responsiveness, safety, and resilience strengthens the case for rate recovery and capital plans.
• Improved Reliability
  Better dispatch and sequencing reduce System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) minutes and improve System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) outcomes.
• Safer Operations
  Context-aware guidance reduces exposure as extreme events intensify.
• More Effective Field Crews
  As experienced workers retire and hiring pipelines remain constrained ³, augmenting the frontline becomes the most scalable investment.
• O&M efficiency
  Fewer callbacks, fewer errors, fewer escalations, and fewer unnecessary miles translate into better use of scarce field hours.
• Investment Protection
  More effective work operations protect asset life duration and prevent failures.

Utilities that treat field operations as a critical opportunity to drive digital transformation – not just a scheduling function – will be far better equipped for the labor and reliability challenges of the 2030s and beyond.

As grids become more dynamic and weather more volatile, the organizations that succeed will be those that enhance workforce capacity without compromising safety. They will invest in usability, situational awareness, and governed AI to make crews faster, more confident, and more resilient.

Operational friction has quietly become one of the greatest constraints on reliability. Removing it – crew by crew, job by job – can deliver one of the fastest, most notable returns in any modernization effort.

1. Utility Dive, US energy infrastructure gets a D+ from American Society of Civil Engineers, March 27, 2025
2. Climate Central, Weather‑related Power Outages Rising, April 24, 2024.
3. International Energy Agency (IEA), World Energy Employment 2025, December 5, 2025.