Faces of EBCE: Energy Generations: Taj Ait-Laoussine

Our VP of data comes from an energy family with roots in the Algerian revolution.

When EBCE’s chief of technology and data analytics Taj Ait-Laoussine says “I come from an energy family,” you should believe him.

Taj’s father, Nordine, served as the Energy Minister of Algeria in the early 1990s, after working to nationalize the oil and gas industry for his country, setting up an oil and gas consultancy in Geneva, then working with OPEC members and oil companies. Nordine was present at the OPEC meeting in Vienna in 1975 where 60 hostages were taken by the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. He went on to advise some of the most influential energy decision-makers in the industry before becoming Minister. He still runs his consultancy to this day.

For his father, Taj says, promoting independent domestic oil and gas production was part of the nation building that Algeria was pursuing after winning independence from France in 1962. Nordine played an active role in the war to end colonization and promote energy self-sufficiency for Algeria and other emerging economies.

Algeria set up a state-owned oil company after independence and joined OPEC in 1969. It is currently the world’s sixth largest producer of natural gas, much of which is exported to Europe. Today, Nordine advises Algeria and others in shifting their attention from fossil fuels to renewable resources.

Taj got to see his father’s role in building Algeria’s energy industry, piquing his own interest in energy.

“I was quite interested in the national benefits of his work, but not in promoting fossil fuels,” he says.” “I was and still am more concerned about climate change and the other environmental issues around energy.”

Finding a New Energy

Taj was born and grew up in Algiers, the capital city of Algeria, after his father returned from college at the University of Michigan, where he met Taj’s mother. Eventually, Taj made his way to the Bay Area in 1989 to pursue a degree in Physics at UC Berkeley.

“I was really into Physics, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with a Physics degree,” he recalls. But when he stumbled across a course on renewable energy taught through the Energy and Resources Group, a new avenue opened up.

“I was drawn to the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at UC Berkeley,” he says. “It was full of physicists trying to solve the world’s energy problems. I thought, these are my people!”

After graduating from Berkeley in 1993 Taj went to work for an energy efficiency consulting firm. He then returned to Berkeley to pursue a degree at ERG, with a focus on demand response and energy efficiency.

The Power of Data

By the time Taj graduated from ERG, two trends were about to converge. The dot.com boom was already underway, transforming the way business was conducted and people interacted. California was also on the verge of a major energy crisis, after the deregulation of the electricity sector ultimately resulted in a major disruption in supply and rolling blackouts.

Taj joined Silicon Energy, a data company focusing on harnessing the power of energy data. There, he quickly went to work on modernizing demand response technology for commercial and industrial customers, to help alleviate the impacts of the energy crisis.

Demand response consists of providing signals and incentives to electricity customers to encourage them to temporarily reduce consumption at times of high energy demand or prices. This was especially important during the rolling blackouts that California experienced in the early 2000s.

At first, the signals were literally phone calls from utilities to factory managers. “In those days, meters for big commercial customers used a system and protocol called MV90, which we jokingly referred to as ‘measurement and verification for the ‘90s,’” Taj says. “It seemed old then, and what’s funniest is that it is still in use today at over 600 utilities, including PG&E and by extension EBCE.”

​​That protocol allowed the utility to call the meter once a month with a modem to collect consumption data, for billing purposes. At Silicon Energy, Taj worked on a team that modified the system to call the meters every five minutes, collecting vital near-real-time data that would then be immediately shared with the participants online, to improve their participation and ensure compliance. “Silicon Energy was a dot.com helping to solve the energy crisis,” Taj says, “I liked that combination a lot”.

Meter technology evolved over the years, first to Automated Meter Reading (AMR), that could be read once a day, to Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), which sent out a constant stream of data. A boom in AMI meters came from the 2009 economic stimulus program from the Obama Administration. By then, Taj had joined a utility data company called DataRaker.

“That’s when we hit the jackpot. Utilities were getting tons of data from AMI but didn’t know what to do with it,” he says. “AMI is very chatty, it gives you tons of information, just drowning you in data, but it’s not very smart – it doesn’t tell you anything about what the data means.”

“That’s when I realized how antiquated a lot of utility metering and billing systems were,” he says. “They would receive hundreds of thousands of data points from a customer, but only use one or two of those data points, and really only to calculate a bill.”

DataRaker put the data to work for utilities across the country. In Pennsylvania they could quickly identify customers with abnormally high natural gas consumption or irregular electric consumption and send out technicians to check for dangerous gas leaks or tampered meters that posed safety risks. In Wisconsin, they helped proactively identify and repair gas meter failures that would result in abnormally low bills, or worse, frozen pipes.

For a project in Idaho, Taj had used meter data to show whether a utility needed to upgrade its power circuits, by analyzing the data from each individual customer rather than just assuming all customers would use maximum power at the same time. The analysis showed big upgrades could be put off for years before they might be needed, with potential savings in the millions of dollars.

“It demonstrated to me the power of data analysis,” he says. “We could do a lot of cost avoidance and reduction through the smart use of meter data.”

The combination of Big Data and Software as a Service made the company very trendy, and it was acquired by software giant Oracle in 2012.

Finding EBCE

Living in San Francisco, Taj learned of EBCE through a colleague who knew CEO Nick Chaset. “He said they were starting a new utility, and I said who starts a new utility in California?!” he recalls. “Oh it’s a CCA, I’ve heard of those.”

Taj joined EBCE in 2017, first as a consultant, then as Vice President of Technology and Data Analytics in 2018. He put his years of experience in energy software to work, building EBCE’s data and analytics platform from scratch on the Google Cloud Platform. “They are so easy to use compared to what we had to do back in the day,” he says.

The platform is a multi-use tool, collecting and analyzing over 6 billion data points per year. EBCE is using “machine learning” techniques to more accurately identify customers at risk of falling behind on energy bills, so they can be reached with assistance programs. Better data is also increasing the accuracy of demand forecasts, reducing the cost of error and increasing reliability. And it is facilitating new programs, like energy efficiency programs that Pay for Performance.

“Basically, it allows us to be more efficient, to do things faster and with less resources,” says Taj. “It will result in greater customer retention and customer satisfaction and helps to promote our local development objectives.”

A New Generation

While the circumstances couldn’t be more different, Taj has continued the family interest in energy.

“In some ways EBCE is on the cutting edge of today’s energy challenge, climate change,” Taj says. “At EBCE, we’re helping build the future of energy, which in a small way is just like my Dad was helping build the future of Algeria.”