The ERCOT Innovation Summit gathered experts from Texas and across North America on Tuesday to collaborate on how to deal with the greatest challenges facing the grid.

“How do we optimize this grid of the future for the benefit of cost and reliability, what consumers care about,” said Pablo Vegas, President and CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

Vegas says too much is changing too fast not to bring together stakeholders who can best prepare for the next natural disaster or technological advancement.

“Today we’re looking up on the horizon, we’re looking further down the road, we’re looking at what the potential is, what are those challenges and opportunities,” said Vegas.

The latest challenge in Texas came last week when a violent storm left seven dead and almost a million people without power.

“Resiliency is a huge issue,” said Peter Quinsey with the energy data company Lowfoot.

Quinsey was in Houston when it was blasted by destructive winds and torrential rain. The stakeholder from Toronto is now in Austin to find out what consumers and businesses can do to be more self-sufficient in a natural disaster and day-to-day.

“People are paying a lot more attention to their energy consumption, how they’re using it and what they’re spending on it. When people pay attention they tend to make decisions around that,” said Quinsey.

National energy expert Dr. Steven Ashby was the keynote speaker at ERCOT’s Innovation Summit. He says a priority is to better understand the impacts of natural disasters on the grid. One example of what’s possible came during Hurricane Harvey.

“What we did there was had our understanding of the infrastructure through our energy folks. Then national security had real-time overhead imagery. We overlaid those two and were able to provide the only real-time information to the utility operators as to whether their assets were flooded or not,” said Dr. Ashby.

During the first ERCOT Innovation Summit organizers say they are already planning to make it an annual event.