Corey O’Meara (E.ON): Finding Real Quantum Advantage in Grid Optimization

Yuval Boger interviews Corey O’Meara, Chief Quantum Scientist at E.ON Digital Technology. They discuss how E.ON’s five-person quantum team works with business units to find high-value use cases, especially where classical methods may hit bottlenecks in optimization and machine learning. Corey describes the company’s work on peer-to-peer energy trading and other grid-related applications, and shares his perspective on cloud access, hybrid deployment, and the accelerating progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Transcript

Corey: Hello, Corey, and thank you for joining me today. Thanks for having me.

Yuval: So who are you and what do you do?

Corey: Yeah, so my name is Corey and I’m chief quantum scientist at E.on Digital Technology. And there I’m technically leading the applied quantum computing program at one of Europe’s largest utility companies.

Yuval: E.on, as you mentioned, is a very large company. How large is the Quantum team and when did it get started?

Corey: Yeah, great question. So we’re a pretty modest team. We’re five full-time employees on the project and the team. And we started in around 2020. It’s kind of an interesting story. So in the early days, we were approached– so I should preface it that the department where it lands is in– it used to be called the Data and AI Department, or DataOn. And we basically were looking at how to apply machine learning and optimization for different business use cases across the company. And at the time, 2019, 2020, quantum started to get a little bit of a buzz in the industry sector. And so it kind of came actually from the board level. So it came from top down. They asked, hey, you guys in the department down here, you know, working on internal tooling, what is this quantum computing thing? And I had originally done my PhD in quantum computing actually. So we started discussing and came up with a short little kind of proof of concept about a business use case. And that sort of started the momentum and the internal traction. And over the years, yeah, we’ve grown the team. We’ve gotten more external funding, more internal funding, more stakeholder buy-in and yeah, have been working on finding where can quantum advantage be achieved for real world business use case scenarios.