Who Owns Robot Power Planning — Operations, Energy, or IT?
Part I traced embodied AI’s energy problem into the actuator. Part II follows directly: the actuator creates the load, someone has to plan it, and a robot cell has three parents and no owner.
Operations owns takt and uptime; energy or facilities owns feeder, contract and peak; IT owns the agent, twin and edge box. Each optimizes correctly for its own mandate, which is exactly why the gap is invisible until the meter spikes. A robot rated “only 3 kW” is invisible per line until forty dock in the same quarter-hour; edge inference gets booked as an IT load, not part of the cell’s electrical envelope. The result: surprise peaks with no accountable cause, and efficiency projects orphaned between functions.
The fix isn’t a new department, it’s a named owner holding one six-line power sheet (duty-cycle kW, fleet-wide coincident peaks, charging windows, regeneration, standby, edge-compute), signed jointly before the cell is frozen. The working split: operations chairs, energy holds a veto on peak, IT holds a veto on anything unloggable, and procurement enforces, no order closes without three-way sign-off, pilots included. Your action this week: put operations, energy and IT in one room and ask who owns all three pieces at once. Full power sheet at renegrywnow.com.
Reflection questions
Who, today, owns all three pieces of your robot power problem at once, or does the room go quiet?
Would a robot “rated only 3 kW” show up in your plan once forty dock in the same quarter-hour?
Can a pilot cell skip your power sign-off, and become next year’s unplanned-load precedent?
Keywords: Robot Power Planning, Coincident Peak, Energy Governance, Power Sheet, Ownership, Procurement Gate, Edge AI Load, Decision Rights, Operations Energy IT, Physical AI
Series: Energy Dominance · Week 41 · Part II
Previous: Part I — Actuators, Motors, Gearboxes: The Hidden Energy Bill.
