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Kostas has been with the NM Group since 2011. Although his background was not originally in utilities or geospatial data, he’s always had a passion for Geography so the NM Group has been a perfect fit.

Before becoming CEO, Kostas managed numerous teams, projects, and departments within the company. During his previous role as Director of Operations, he obtained an impressive Executive MBA Degree in 2021.

So now he is in the role of CEO, where does he think the NM Group is at right now and where does he see us going in the future? We’ve asked him a few questions to find out. . .

Q: What do you think is the NM Group’s biggest strength right now?

A: With its roots stemming from National Grid, NM Group has always been uniquely positioned to serve power network operators. We understand the importance and intricacies of the challenges that our customers face.

Over the years, the company has attracted amazing talent and developed excellent processes and procedures to join the geospatial and engineering data.

Having an in-house capability to engage clients, plan and manage projects, collect and process data and serve the analysis in a range of ways is tremendous.

I believe this works because of the great mix of skills, experience, and competence that NM Group people have.

Q: From your experience at NM Group, what would you say are the main challenges facing power utilities?

A: This is a highly complex topic and is always context dependent. However, in the regions where NM Group is active (North America, UK, Australia), I would stress three key challenges: 

·        Aging infrastructure and the need to rapidly invest into upgrading the networks whilst making them adaptable to the long-term future energy generation and usage changes.

·        Regulatory framework to incentivise the large network operators to develop innovative ways of safely and reliably increasing the efficiency and capacity of the network.

·        Attracting, developing, and retaining the talent necessary to keep the safe, uninterrupted, and efficient performance of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution.

Q: How does NM Group help utilities to meet these challenges?

A: NM Group helps stakeholders at some of the largest transmission and distribution network operators.  We provide high-quality and accurate data and analysis about the current position and condition of assets.

We’re also assisting utilities to unlock the network capacity by identifying the bottlenecks or possible faults in the system. We model scenarios for increasing the uptime of electricity consumers.

Finally, we work hard to understand our customers and provide them with synthesized and analyzed data in a way that is easy to understand or ingest into existing systems. I always enjoy seeing examples of our technical and project management teams working directly with the client stakeholders to improve or perfect an existing way of doing work at a utility.

Q: What excites you the most about where this company is heading?

A: I’m excited to see higher adoption and application of geospatial and remotely sensed data by the utilities. NM Group's ability to produce highly accurate and customer-specific data rapidly should help us continue contributing to the energy transition that is taking off.

Additionally, we’re successfully developing innovative software solutions to make the best operational decisions for asset management and for unlocking network capacities.

Thank you for your insight Kostas Lopsaitis! We’re very excited about the future of NM Group with you at the helm.