Gerry Cauley is no stranger to high-risk scenarios that demand effective mitigation strategies. As a Principal Consultant in the Energy Business Advisory Group at industrial manufacturing giant, Siemens, his work centers around the integration of emerging technologies including renewables, distributed energy resources, and digital technologies.
Cauley also helps energy companies create a holistic mitigation plan in cases of extreme risks, and oversees resilience and cybersecurity issues. Using a wealth of expertise, Cauley helps posture these companies to embrace risk mitigation approaches and advanced technologies in a rapidly changing industry landscape.
What are the primary challenges facing the modern-day energy enterprise? Gerry Cauley has an answer.
“The risks prevalent in the energy industry run the gamut. Everything from financial risk and stranded assets to cyber attack or severe natural event to environmental impact – these instances bring with them a tremendous liability and can adversely sway the company’s bottom line.”
Cauley speaks from experience. He served in Guyana, South America, as part of a consulting group, tasked with advising the CEO and executive personnel of the Guyana Power and Light. The group worked to manage risk and reduce system-wide outage, upgrade the system control center, and oversee the distribution feeder outage performance improvements.
Gerry Cauley’s risk management philosophy includes unique solutions and strategies that help companies quickly respond to the ever-changing energy landscape and also foresee the unprecedented. Cauley’s motto is quite simple in this regard, “Instead of planning to meet minimum reliability standards, utilities should consider resilience and ensure they are prepared to manage the consequences of more severe events.”
“In my work, I focus on reducing losses and costs that are associated with energy – an industry fraught with challenges. My team works to manage the total cost of risk, and insure operations and assets against threats and environmental impacts.”
In this day and age, technology is the bedrock of a successful business venture. A vital part of Cauley’s mitigation strategy is cybersecurity. His initiatives create the proper framework to accommodate security event monitoring, intrusion prevention, and real-time detection systems – all to respond to cyberattacks that occur anywhere in the critical infrastructure.
Better grid resilience and the ability to recover from catastrophic events are at the forefront of Gerry Cauley‘s strategies. The consultant has been key in facilitating the first three of six discussions with Hawai’i Electric and their stakeholders to create resilience inputs to plan their future power grid. The consultant and his team accounted for severe threats like hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and floods.
Against this backdrop, companies, with the help of consultants like Gerry Cauley, have developed risk functions to evolve governance, investments, policies, technologies, models and technology development.
Cauley backs his work up quite simply. “In the face of these issues, we’re left to seek out proactive risk assessment measures to facilitate a speedy recovery and acceptable outcomes.”
Gerry Cauley was recently named Head of Strategy and Planning Practice. He works closely with the energy industry, developing and leveraging opportunities that the digitalization era has to offer. His objective is to create value and help businesses poise themselves for future sustainability and growth.
