Department of Energy, Clean Energy to Communities Grid Modernization Strategic Facilitation & Advisory Group Facilitation

Department of Energy (DOE) Clean Energy to Communities Grid Modernization Strategic Facilitation & Advisory Group Facilitation

Nashville Area Sustainable Human-centered Grid Modernization Strategy (NASH-GMS)

Grid Modernization | Digital Twin | Strategic Facilitation | Stakeholder Engagement | Community Advisory Group

Project Overview

NASH-GMS is an ongoing, multi-year U.S. Department of Energy-funded grid modernization initiative focused on developing a digital twin of Nashville Electric Service’s distribution network. The initiative brought together Nashville Electric Service, Nashville Office of the Mayor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Mid-West Tennessee Clean Fuels, Urban League of Greater Nashville, and additional community-based organizations to evaluate future grid scenarios and support long-term distribution planning.

The technical work addressed distributed energy resources, transportation and building electrification, renewable energy, energy storage, reliability, resilience, extreme-weather conditions, and future infrastructure needs. Stakeholder and community input was incorporated alongside technical modeling to inform the broader planning process.

Greater Than Equal was engaged as a stakeholder engagement and strategic facilitation partner, supporting collaboration across the initiative’s technical, utility, institutional, and community workstreams.

The Challenge

NASH-GMS required multiple organizations and stakeholder groups to contribute different forms of expertise to the same grid modernization initiative.

Utility leadership brought operational, reliability, resilience, customer, and infrastructure priorities. Engineers and researchers brought expertise in modeling scenarios and future grid conditions. Community-based organizations contributed trusted relationships and insight into community priorities, while government and institutional partners brought additional responsibilities and project considerations.

Technical modeling, utility priorities, stakeholder engagement, and community research also progressed on different timelines and continued to evolve as the project advanced.

The stakeholder-engagement challenge was to maintain alignment across these different perspectives and workstreams while ensuring that stakeholder priorities remained connected to the project’s technical and planning decisions.

The Complexity

Several factors increased the complexity of the work:

multiple institutional partners with distinct responsibilities and areas of expertise;
highly technical grid modeling alongside operational, institutional, and community considerations;
recurring collaboration across partner, technical, community, and advisory structures;
evolving priorities influenced by operational needs, technical findings, external conditions, and stakeholder input;
a multi-year project timeline requiring continuity across different phases of work; and
the need to reach stakeholders who might not participate through conventional engagement channels.

GTE maintained a clear facilitation role within that environment. Overall project management and technical decision-making remained with the appropriate project partners, while GTE designed and facilitated the collaborative processes that helped partners understand one another, work through emerging questions, maintain alignment, and identify next steps.

Our Approach

Greater Than Equal applied its Strategic Impact Facilitation Framework to design and guide stakeholder engagement across several interconnected components of NASH-GMS.

The framework provided a structured approach for maintaining shared purpose, building trust across stakeholders, integrating different forms of expertise, navigating changing priorities and power dynamics, and adapting the facilitation process as project needs evolved.

For cross-partner sessions, GTE designed meeting objectives, agenda architecture, discussion sequencing, collaborative activities, and intended outcomes. Sessions created space for substantive discussion while moving participants toward decisions, responsibilities, timelines, and next steps.

GTE also facilitated the recurring Community Insights Team, creating an ongoing structure for community-facing partners to coordinate engagement activities, make decisions, prepare for project milestones, and identify questions requiring input from other project workstreams.

For the Community Advisory Group, GTE designed and facilitated participatory sessions for approximately 30 community leaders. Meetings combined project and technical updates with small-group discussions, brainstorming, resource identification, and whole-group dialogue, creating recurring opportunities for advisors to identify priorities, raise questions, surface gaps, and contribute local knowledge.

GTE’s formal scope also included stakeholder research, workshops, focus groups and community forums, partner communication, documentation of stakeholder input, and support for incorporating stakeholder insights into project decision-making and reporting.

Connecting Technical, Utility & Stakeholder Priorities

A central challenge throughout the engagement was maintaining alignment among stakeholders who approached the project from different perspectives.

GTE structured cross-partner discussions so utility leadership could establish operational context, technical partners could explain modeling scenarios and capabilities, community partners could introduce stakeholder findings and local considerations, and project partners could identify areas requiring additional analysis, engagement, or decisions.

Rather than treating these contributions as separate workstream updates, GTE connected information across the conversation, drew relevant expertise into the discussion, synthesized emerging perspectives, surfaced unresolved questions, and guided the group toward defined next steps.

This became particularly important as extreme-weather and grid-resilience considerations increased in priority. GTE adapted the facilitation process to create space for utility priorities, technical modeling considerations, and stakeholder insights to be examined together while maintaining continuity with the broader project objectives.

Maintaining Stakeholder Intent as the Project Evolved

NASH-GMS was designed to incorporate stakeholder and community perspectives into the grid modernization process rather than treating engagement as a separate activity.

GTE maintained focus on that intent as the project progressed.

As part of the project’s stakeholder-mapping work, GTE designed and facilitated a collaborative process to identify stakeholder groups, understand their relationship to the initiative, prioritize participation, and identify existing relationship pathways.

The process also examined where conventional engagement methods might leave important perspectives unrepresented and which project partners or community organizations already held trusted relationships with those stakeholders.

The resulting analysis helped inform development and recruitment of the Community Advisory Group, connecting stakeholder identification, prioritization, trusted relationships, and ongoing participation.

That same discipline continued throughout the engagement. GTE consistently surfaced questions about who was represented, which perspectives were missing, where additional input was needed, and how stakeholder insights connected back to the project’s broader objectives.

Adapting Facilitation Without Losing Momentum

GTE used a structured but adaptive approach to facilitation through its Strategic Impact Facilitation Framework.

Each session began with defined objectives and intended outcomes, but the process was adjusted when discussion surfaced information that warranted deeper exploration.

During one Community Advisory Group session, breakout report-outs raised questions that could benefit from technical and utility expertise already in the room. Instead of limiting the exchange to scheduled report-outs, GTE expanded the discussion to allow community, utility, and technical perspectives to interact in real time.

The remaining agenda was then adjusted. A planned question whose purpose had already been accomplished organically through the discussion was eliminated, allowing the group to continue the higher-value conversation while still achieving the session’s objectives and ending on schedule.

Throughout facilitated sessions, GTE also carried participant contributions forward, connected observations across different points in the conversation, and linked stakeholder comments back to broader project questions.

This allowed the facilitation process to respond to what was actually happening in the room without losing direction, decisions, ownership, or momentum.

Progress & Outcomes to Date

NASH-GMS remains underway. To date, GTE’s work has helped establish and support the stakeholder infrastructure for the initiative, including:

a collaborative stakeholder-mapping process that informed stakeholder prioritization and engagement;
development of an approximately 30-member Community Advisory Group;
recurring facilitation of the Community Insights Team;
recurring Community Advisory Group sessions structured around substantive stakeholder input and project discussion;
cross-partner facilitation connecting technical, utility, institutional, and community perspectives;
processes for identifying missing perspectives and trusted pathways for broader participation; and
mechanisms for bringing stakeholder questions, priorities, and insights into broader project conversations.

The next phase of engagement is expected to expand beyond the standing Community Advisory Group through community focus groups facilitated by GTE. Those sessions are intended to explore survey findings, community experiences, resilience priorities, and other emerging issues in greater depth, with findings incorporated into subsequent project engagement and planning.

As NASH-GMS continues, GTE’s stakeholder engagement and facilitation work will support the initiative’s broader grid modernization and distribution-planning process.