Smart Grid Today Podcast: Recent Episodes
Sam Spencer
The Smart Grid Today Podcast is produced by Modern Markets Intelligence Inc., publisher of the Smart Grid Today newsletter, the leading subscription-based daily trade newsletter covering the modernization of electric utility industry infrastructure. Email sgtp@mminews.com to be added to the list for updates about the podcast.
Avi Gopstein is the smart grid program manager and group leader at NIST, the US federal government’s National Institute of Standards & Technology, which has played and still plays an ongoing key role in the development of interoperability standards and testing in the smart grid world. He explained how standards enable the smart grid, especially behind the meter as the energy world works to abolish carbon emissions completely with renewables, demand response, and electric vehicles, and much more – and he shared examples of where the industry is headed with standards profiles that help bring order where existing or new standards can cover a complex variety of use cases.
Copper Labs helps utilities and their customers gain significant value from real-time energy monitoring using meter data – whether that’s smart meters or the drive-by AMR systems that are still widely used by electric utilities. The Copper Labs hardware ships with both systems to help utilities transition from AMR to smart grid as it delivers real-time data to a utility’s customer through a mobile app and to the utility through a web interface...
CPower has been offering demand response aggregation for C&I customers for many years and as the electric industry and marketplace has been evolving, the firm has gained lots of experience in turning opportunities to find great value in how energy and DERs are managed into grid-balancing and energy market financial wins for its customers and the utilities that serve them, and they told us all about it...
John Marcolini is senior VP of the network solutions business unit at Itron and his division was faced with the interesting challenge of deploying the network for the smart meter rollout of Con Edison in the five boroughs of New York City, a city of some 60,000 buildings plus all the subway stations – and he shared with us his insights about the project.
Andy has been working with utility software for many years including at IBM and Schneider Electric and started as CEO at MPrest in April, helping grow the company that invented the Iron Dome system that protects Israel from missiles and that helps electric utilities around the globe automate their critical systems. He told us about his firm’s technology and his predictions for the future...
Sonnen US VP Adam Gentner is in charge of the premium products and projects business unit that specializes in virtual power plants (VPPs) using the firm’s home- and business-based battery systems and its own proprietary software. Claudia Kolbinger is VP in charge of the consumer products business which is focused on business development with large partners. The firm has deployed a large VPP in Germany and has several others elsewhere and is building on its existing success to bring the prosumer, grid-balancing, wholesale market, and carbon reduction benefits of VPPs to homes and businesses everywhere.
Hitachi Energy Senior Vice President of Enterprise Software Solutions Bryan Freehoff spoke with us about his firm's Asset Performance Management software or APM and the value it brings electric utilities in multiple ways including critical safety awareness during fire season. Please note that since we spoke to Bryan on this call, his company changed its name from Hitachi ABB Power Grids to Hitachi Energy.
Allan shared with us details about how SEPA conceived of and created its first-ever utility transformation challenge, an in-depth series of surveys that culminated in a report issued this year to help SEPA members and the industry at large see clearly what can be accomplished as the industry ramps up its modernization efforts. This episode was recorded earlier this year but due to our scheduling limitations, it is being released at a key moment in history as the world meets in Glasgow Scotland and discuss what can be accomplished to further the battle against climate change...
Matthew Smith is Itron’s director of grid management and spoke with us about the growing applications that take advantage of grid-edge computing in the firm’s smart grid deployments with a special focus on wildfire prevention. We spoke about what applications Itron is offering now and also what is being tested in the field for release to customers in the near future.
EnerVenue formed to bring to market the unique hydrogen metal battery – that was reinvented by a leading materials scientist at Stanford University after decades of use in spacecraft, satellites, and the Hubble Space Telescope because it is extremely safe, extremely durable, and can take almost infinite charges and discharges. The original formula was extremely expensive but EnerVenue is here now with a much more affordable version that is ready to change the electric industry and Heinemann told us all about it.
Former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman and current Chief Regulatory Officer of Voltus Jon Wellinghoff told us about how when he led FERC, he helped establish the regulatory and legal foundation, through technical conferences, rulemakings, and ultimately in a case at the US Supreme Court, for how smart grid and its associated technologies, these days called distributed energy resources (DERs), would be introduced into markets. He helped us see the history and the very bright future he is working with Voltus to help create and this is one interview not to miss.
Foghorn COO Chris Penrose told us about his firm’s offering which began as a software platform to help manufacturers automate their operations has evolved into a flexible suite of advance automation and analysis programs being used in a wide variety of industries including buildings and campuses to monitor systems, find and fix energy waste, and help customers meet carbon reduction goals.
Sense CEO Mike Phillips and the other founders of Sense came from the speech recognition world, bringing their understanding of audio wave forms to the subtle but distinct electrical wave forms created in the home by electric appliances. The firm uses a device installed behind the meter – and more recently introduced software for use in the Landis & Gyr Revelo meter – that brings value to home owners and to their electricity providers by gleaning what devices are using how much power and when. Teamwork with Schneider Electric is bringing the firm’s software into smart homes and Phillips told us how the value of the firm’s offering is growing by sampling the waveforms on the distribution grid, too.
Brian Levite is regulatory affairs director for S&C Electric, a century-old firm that from the start was dedicated to making technology that transforms the grid into a safer and more effective system. His role allows him to deftly explain the benefits of smarter grids and he joined us to discuss the firm’s annual reliability report and some very surprising gaps in reliability that were recorded last year.
Electriq Power is an electricity storage provider for residential electricity customers that offers backup power plus the wide array of values that aggregated storage deployments can bring to electricity providers and their customers. He shared some details about a pilot project in the Caribbean and a commercial deployment in California along with his take on how the fast-paced evolution of the electric industry is creating really exciting opportunities that his firm is addressing.
Andrew Heath is a senior director at JD Power working in its utility intelligence practice. He shared lots of insights about the firm’s traditional utility customer satisfaction tracking and benchmarks and also about the new environmental and social governance metrics for the electric industry. How the tremendous investments that are being made in modernizing the industry are perceived is critical as the firm found out customers who know more about infrastructure work being done seem to have a higher level of satisfaction, but the industry is not always great at sharing the news of the benefits its work may be building.
Store Dot defied all the predictions and created a battery technology that lets batteries of any size be charged in five minutes. The accomplishment was built on a nobel-prize winning battery formula and the use of machinery built for the biotech industry to make nanomaterials that can safely take a charge at incredible speeds. The implications for the utility industry and every industry that uses electricity – including now the transportation sector with EVs and electric trucks, buses and trains – are tremendous and Myersdorf spoke to the role his products could play in the electric grid for load balancing and much more.
Coretec CEO Michael Kraft told us about a brand new battery breakthrough his company is bringing to market that improves the energy density of lithium ion batteries by two to three times. Kraft is well aware of how the battery market is preparing for massive growth and he described how his technology has an edge on the competition and how battery storage is the key to bringing within reach the decarbonization of the grid, and of transportation, and beyond.
Leclanche CEO Anil Srivastava’s knowledge and insights are fueled by a career that spans the smart grid story arc, from being an electrical engineer who worked with Hewlett Packard and a leading nuclear generator to taking the helm at a battery company that understands how electrochemistry, energy management software, and sound telecom networks merge to play a key role in the modernization of electric grids large and small being rolled out or still just imagined as the electric industry faces tremendous evolution – and he shared his vision with us.
Justin Fier is director of threat intel and analytics at Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm that uses artificial intelligence for many industries including electric utilities of all sizes to identify when bad actors are moving in the system and shut them down. This is the second visit of Darktrace to our show and Justin helped us look at recent developments in the industry and shared insights about why the risks of cybersecurity should not interfere with the modernization of industries including the electric industry.
Strohecker is company managing director for Hitachi ABB Power Grids in Canada. He shed light on multiple facets of his firm’s smart grid deployments including how ABB has been managing to continue its critical smart grid work during the pandemic, about the key roles smart grid technology plays in the global transition to carbon-free electricity including multiple examples of projects his firm has been involved with, and also about the combination of ABB Power Grids with Hitachi and why that pairing offers big opportunities to both firms.
Six-K is a firm using a novel plasma-furnace process developed at MIT to manufacture key battery components that cut the time and cost of battery production by a very dramatic percentage. Holman is a long time veteran of battery technology firms including A123 and he described how the traditional approach to creating some battery parts takes a couple days to complete while his firm uses its microwave-based plasma process that burns at 6,000°F, hence the name of his company, to make the ingredients in mere seconds, a time and cost savings he believes can drastically improve the economics for battery storage on the grid.
Sam duPont is a principal for strategic programs in the strategy group at Baltimore Gas & Electric and he spoke to us about a smart city/smart home pilot program being rolled out in Annapolis, Md, using smart meter data and connected devices to offer a select group of opt-in residential and small business customers control over their energy use He told us about the success of the messaging the utility used and the focus on groups such as low-income customers to make sure the feedback was coming not just from early adopters.
Anterix owns the licenses for 900 MHz spectrum used by electric utilities and others to deploy private LTE broadband networks used for smart grid and other purposes. The firm recently saw the culmination of a five-year FCC rulemaking that set the rules for the use of 900 Mhz spectrum for utilities and President Rob Schwartz told us about the history and the benefits this spectrum offers – and why utilities want to deploy private broadband networks using this cell-phone standards, and how several utilities already deployed pilots of it including Ameren, Florida Power & Light, New York Power Authority, and how Southern Company was the first to roll it out in earnest.
Amply CEO Vic Shao, a former battery storage lead at energy technology giant Engie, started Amply in 2018 to solve major problems that he saw holding back the electrification of big fleets of vehicles such as city buses when he realized managers of these fleets were unsure how to buy power, how to choose charging equipment, or what to do when the power goes out. This is a massive shift into unknown territory and Shao realized Amply could help smooth the transition with service model that answers these problems and many others. He told us all about how it works.
Colin Gibbs joined us to discuss how Bidgely is not only helping its clients manage the sudden changes brought on by the pandemic, which he described in detail, but also how the firm is developing fast answers for utility firms around the globe to help their customers through these tumultuous times. He has an inspiring view of the industry, where it is headed in normal times, and how to help manage the current crisis.
Stem is a leader in energy storage using batteries and VP Ted Ko spoke to us about the state of storage in the electric industry including which states around the US have policies and budgets that are driving growth including California where funding for battery deployments in low-income facilities fell far short of demand. New York set what Ko called the gold standard with its storage roadmap and opportunities are flourishing in other states. Untapped value streams in distribution-grid support and for microgrids using battery storage are quite exciting and Ko told us what is working and what needs to change in regulatory efforts.
Shuli Goodman in her second time on the program shared insights about how the pandemic offers urgent lessons for the electric industry that need to be heard to make sure the accelerating changes in the energy world do not take the industry by surprise. The LF in LF Energy stands for Linux Foundation and her organization is working with many big-name utilities and technology providers in the industry to develop software to help weather the upheaval that is already unfolding. She described how this work is meant to help.
Jess Melanson is COO and president of Utilidata, a software firm that offers a grid-edge operating system that adds value to smart grid deployments. The firm started by delivering voltage optimization using AMI (smart-meter) data a decade ago and now offers that and much more for electric utilities to bring great value to their smart grid deployments by maximizing the returns on their technology investments with top notch software the firm created itself and also acquired. This is a real heart-of-the-smart-grid technology value conversation that touches on regulatory issues and what the industry can accomplish with smart grid.
Patty Durand, CEO of the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative in a return visit to the program, this time spoke about her organization’s in-depth research on “beneficial electrification” – a phrase meant to encompass the massive shift in society toward electricity as the main energy for industry, homes, and transportation, and making sure the electricity used is generated with the least carbon emissions possible, preferably no carbon at all. This carbon-free energy goal is being set by nations, states, industry leaders among major corporations, and the SECC looked at multiple reports and interviewed a dozen industry experts to see where this process is, where its going and how the consumer fits into this electric industry mass evolution.
Paul Dailey is director of product and market strategy for Outback Power, a subsidiary of storage giant EnerSys that is focused on pairing battery storage with distributed renewables generation. As one might guess from the name, the firm has roots in the off-the-grid sector of solar that has been growing for decades but his firm is seeing great opportunities in the solar boom and the need for distributed generation to store the product it generates onsite.
Zinc8 Energy Solutions CEO Ron MacDonald and Chief Technology Officer Simon Fan shared with us various compelling stories about the firm’s breakthrough, long-term, arguably almost infinite power storage technology, including how they won out against over 100 applicants for a New York Power Authority long-term storage demonstration where the utility, America’s largest publicly owned power producer, took some convincing that the firm’s eight-hour-and-above storage capacity was even real...
Brian van Buskirk is chief product officer for Arbnco, a company with a history of building optimization that is fast developing its relationships with electric utilities and large commercial and industrial clients to use advanced digital tools to maximize the benefits in energy management and hit carbon reduction targets. The name of the company refers to taking the carbon out of buildings and van Buskirk gave us lots of details about the value his firm delivers, his role in expanding the firm into the utility world, and what products are in the pipeline for release soon such as software to let its customers sell their energy management into energy markets.
Kore Power developed the lithium ion power cells it uses in rack mounted energy storage systems for onsite storage deployments up to grid scale storage. The firm sees its software controls as critically important to the value of its products and sees the market for supporting solar and other distributed generation as a wide open field. Gorrill explained why his firm is well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities to serve electric utilities and their customers.
Maggie Alexander is director of business development at energy management technology firm Apparent, a firm that has developed microinverter and energy gateway hardware and the software that takes distributed energy resources in homes and businesses, including municipal bus systems and many others, and manages them intelligently to bring out the most value from the investments being made in solar and energy storage deployments. She told us about the technology and about use cases including selling the electricity into the ISO/RTO markets, and how her company sets itself apart in a market that she said is starting to get crowded with similar services.
ICF Lead Project Manager Laura Frantz and VP and Senior Technical Director David Meisegeier brought us up to speed on ICF's work with utilities using in-home smart speakers with voice assistants. This work, including ongoing in-the-field research at utilities like Con Edison in New York City and Southern Maryland Electricity Cooperative or SMECO, for example, reveals what people want, and frankly what they do not want from their voice assistant.
RadientREIT is pioneering the use of the REIT real-estate construct to treat solar generation deployments as real estate, making solar a very attractive investment. He also told us about his work using home solar plus battery storage to build virtual power plants. This industry is wide open and he has very few competitors, he told us, as he explained how to make the industry work, including how regulatory constructs around the map are blocking progress...
Bertolino is EnelX Head of E-Mobility for USA and Canada and explained how his department is focused on serving the EV charging needs of homes and businesses with 80,000 chargers already deployed globally and plans to deploy many, many more. His firm is owned by electric industry and utility giant Enel and is very much focused on the value the firm’s charging systems can bring on a large scale to the electric industry such as the 40-MW virtual power plant the firm’s charging technology has created in California. His experience spans back to consulting for Enel in the early days of Planet Earth’s first major smart meter rollout in 2002 and he shared details about what the firm is aiming for next.
Line Vision offers a contactless HV transmission line monitoring system that is helping four of the top 10 US electric utilities, plus a consortium of utilities in Europe, extract lots more value from existing and new transmission lines. The system is deployed without interrupting the delivery of electricity and continuously gathers data on every contact point across these lines to help them run more safely and efficiently. Only a very small percentage of HV lines are being monitored today and this creates a huge market his firm is ready to serve.
Redaptive Co-CEO Arvin Vohra and his fellow co-CEO were investment bankers who saw the potential for great value in the energy efficiency world and developed multiple services for C&I customers, helping them finance technology to save money on energy, through efficiency, onsite generation, and the management of the data they can generate to make their operations energy intelligent. The firm started with third-party technology and went on to develop its own applications and project management services and he described for us the variety of ways his customers benefit from what Redaptive offers.
Rajendra Iyer is managing director of Grid Integration Solutions, a business within the renewables energy business of GE that makes and deploys high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission solutions that can be used to either augment existing AC transmission lines and make them run much better with load balancing and other features, or can be deployed anywhere new transmission infrastructure is needed. His vision of the future includes deploying this technology to improve grid operations everywhere but we also talked about how the optimized grid could enhance transactional electricity, the idea of prosumers generating and selling power from homes and businesses and even just removing the cost of electricity entirely from end users.
Google Director of Industry Partnerships Jeff Hamel joined us to update us on the progress his firm has been making in bringing control of energy into the hands of homes and businesses and the energy companies that serve them with its Google Nest Thermostat and with a variety of partner firms. Google rebranded its smart home technologies last year and Hamel explained the firm’s perspective on its role in the smart home, in multi-family residences, and to the utility industry going forward.
AI and cybersecurity firm Darktrace specializes in OT cybersecurity protection using AI to learn everything a system normally does so it can spot unusual behavior right away, helping many top electric utilities and other industries around the globe keep the watchful eye needed to secure their smart grid and smart technology deployments. Technology Director Andrew Tsonchev, like many in his field, balked at the term cybersecurity when it first became a catchphrase but he helped us understand how the word has helped the industry focus in on the kind of new threats its facing and that his firm’s technology was built to protect against.
EV Connect provides a software platform that sits at the heart of the EV charging experience for charging facilities owners including parking lot owners – such as hotels and shopping malls - and commercial and industrial fleet owners and residential EV owners and importantly for us – in many cases, their electricity providers. EV Connect has relationships with some 75 of the big investor-owned electric utilities in the US and others around the globe. For utilities, the platform can help with energy management and demand response and more – and his firm is teamed with General Motors, for example, to help foster the easy transition for that firm’s customers and really for our world to embrace the transition to electrified transportation.
EnergyHub VP of Business Development Matt Johnson shared with us details of the progress his firm has had deploying its distributed energy resource or DER management system (DERMS) with utility firms to help them see true value from the DERs deployed on their grids in the form of energy management and even voltage response. Of the firm’s 40-plus utility clients, mostly in the US, about 10 are now using the EnergyHub system with batteries deployed in customer premises, and this is up from about zero not too many years ago, he told us. The industry is quickly jumping past the piloting stage with full deployments, and the DERs being used include Wi-Fi enabled water heaters and more, he told us.
Marina Donovan returned to the podcast to tell us about a report the firm prepared based on surveys of the electric industry and its customers about emergency preparedness. She is vice president of global marketing and public affairs at Itron and shared what the utilities are doing, what their customers perceive them to be doing, and what more can be done as technology helps the industry cope with nature’s wrath to offer the best possible preparedness and resilience.
Joshua Wong is founder and CEO of Opus One Solutions, an electric grid software firm that works with top electric utilities putting the intelligence into grid operations. The firm started with DER management software (DERMS) but has grown in recent years to offering grid management systems covering many problems and opportunities for its utility clients including transactive energy, and he offered lots of insight into what his firm is doing and what the changing industry can achieve.
Arutyunov is VP of Product Management and a co-founder of Xage Security and returned to the podcast, this time to share details about how Chicago utility Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) is using Xage technology to secure distributed energy resources (DERs) – a timely subject as many experts are telling the electric industry how serious an issue this is today.
Activu Vice President John Stark is a long-time veteran in the utility control room view monitor space and, at Activu, is well versed in the latest developments in serving control room technology for utilities of all sizes along with transmission organizations including ISO/RTOs, along with many other industries that use similar technology. He explained how the control room at the top of today’s smart grids benefits from the latest in digital technology his firm offers and the systems it can interact with and help make more beneficial.
Centrica Business Solutions VP and Head of Sales for North America Kate Sherwood told us about how her firm offers services and technologies – including software, hardware, consulting, and energy procurement, especially focused on DER applications and management and planning for financial risks – for large energy users to help them modernize their operations to best take advantage of the digitalization of the energy world. This is an area of smart grid with big payoffs and she explained details and examples of how her firm delivers these.
Smarter Grid Solutions offers distributed energy resources management software – or DERMS – that answers maybe the most critical dilemma of our time: How to deploy lots of renewable and variable distributed generation onto the grid. With headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland, and a laboratory in New York City, the firm is playing a key role in helping some of the largest utilities in the UK and the US, including Southern California Edison, understand the importance of overbuilding and compensation for curtailment risk. And he explained why.
Viking Cold Storage uses a proprietary technology with a patented approach to creating ice to store energy for industries that need to keep products cold or frozen – such as food, medicines, and others – and is as much a software firm, managing sensors, meters, and controls, as it is a hardware firm. He described incredible energy savings, up to half, that his firm has delivered to its clients, including household name food vendors like Whole Foods, and others across the US and the world. He definitely sees his product and service as a distributed energy resource and he told us about his vision for its role in the modernization of the energy world.
Urjanet gets data from an astounding number of utilities around the globe on behalf of its clients who then can use the data for their own benefit and savings, or pass those services and benefits to end users. The services that are created from the data cover a wide range of opportunities that vary depending on the type of utility the data comes from – not only electric but all kinds of utilities are involved – and can include not just energy savings and efficiency but many others including financial services and even identity verification, such as proving to a bank or other entity that residents live where they say they do. He explained for us how it works...
John Di Stasio is president of the Large Public Power Council (LPPC). He represents the larger municipal electric utilities in advising lawmakers and government officials in Washington, DC, on how laws and regulations can best support the goals his members share with the general public, namely foregoing command and control regulatory models in favor of allowing the ingenuity of the utilities to flourish in creating desired outcomes. His 35-year career in the electric industry includes having been CEO of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, or SMUD, for multiple years the utility was implementing smart grid. We talked about that and lots of relevant topics including how his group thinks the discussions in Congress about infrastructure upgrades need to include the electric industry.
Ryan Kennedy is co-founder and CEO of Atom Power, a company that invented what it believes is the first ever solid state digital breaker switch, allowing digital automation of electrical distribution – at variable scales within the same device. Kennedy described for us the huge values the device offers including virtually ending the deadly threat of arc flash events, allowing remote breaker control and monitoring, super-fast switching, DG scenarios that could change in an instant and whenever needed, and much more.
Bidgely CEO Abhay Gupta explained how Bidgely teams with utilities to build relationships with their customers using artificial intelligence that analyzes what appliances are being used when and even whether the customer has purchased an EV, for example. This lets the utility know who to offer special rates and rebates to and opens a world of value to utilities and their customers, letting that relationship be modernized in ways other industries have been perfecting for years.
This fairly new cybersecurity firm uses blockchain to secure energy infrastructure and has worked with GE on wind turbine security and other energy deployments and features decades of experience in cybersecurity. Arutyunov explained how blockchain makes cybersecurity work and how tackling legacy utility systems and protocols made for interesting challenges as the firm geared up for very large deployments of smart grid technology.
Leclanche Executive VP Bryan Urban sees big opportunities brewing for grid-scale battery systems – including the software that manages them – at the distribution and transmission levels, and is especially focused on how solar plus battery storage is starting to take on characteristics of baseload power generation in both expanding the hours the energy is available but also in frequency regulation and grid support around the globe.
Brent Alderfer is CEO of Community Energy and a former energy lawyer and former state utility regulator for Colorado. His firm for 20 years has been deploying large-scale renewables and he is outspoken about how to make reaching the climate goal of 80% renewables on the grid by 2030 not only doable but really economically attractive for utilities, large C&I customers and even the communities his firm is named for. Community Energy has been driving big deployments of wind and solar for two decades and is now offering big energy storage rollouts. He told us how all this can be so attractive for utilities and non-utility investors.
Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative CEO Patty Durand's organization tracks public awareness of smart grid and related developments in electric industry modernization and has put out multiple reports based on public surveys and surveys of industry executives to help the industry and its regulators understand how messages about the progress of the industry are being received – focused on what’s working where and how to maximize the benefits in the evolving relationships of electricity providers and their customers. Durand spoke to us in detail about a report compiled from several studies that was released this year.
Franklin Energy recently launched the NGAGE platform that lets utilities connect with customers and enable participation in utility programs throughout what the firm calls "every user's unique journey." Scheuller explained how his firm is addressing the changes in the industry with tools that help its utility clients deliver what customers want while at the same time addressing the big changes in generation and grid stability that all utilities are faced with today and going forward. Franklin Energy started 25 years ago managing energy efficiency programs and now, with about 1,200 employees, offers demand response, customer engagement software, and a variety of other services that relate to the smart grid and electric industry modernization.
EMotorWerks CEO Valery Miftakhov founded his firm to retrofit gasoline cars as EVs and soon found out that using EV charging technology to bring value to the grid was a great new opportunity worldwide. He described some of the advanced work his firm has done in showing that vision truly is valuable and also what he hopes utility regulators can accomplish to allow firms like his to bring value to regulation markets where the smaller assets are not supported and by creating new markets where the opportunities are simply untapped.
Google Director of Energy & Enterprise Partnerships Jeff Hamel joined us to talk about the work Google is doing with Xcel Energy in Denver along with other electric utilities and energy firms in its ongoing efforts to grow into a critical role it can play in the energy industry in enabling the energy future imagined by technologists, regulators, the utility industry, and especially the general public. Google devices already at play in this effort include the Nest Learning Thermostat and devices with the Google Assistant, including Android phones and the the Google Home, Google Mini, and Google Hub devices, but those devices can communicate with an ever larger cadre of smart home technologies that are helping evolve the relationship between people and energy, and utility customers and their energy providers.
ICF International utility business Senior Vice President Patty Cook and Senior Manager Justin Mackovyak joined us to discuss the evolution of utility demand-side management projects. ICF is a well respected and very experienced consultancy that among many other specialties, helps electric utilities manage their modernization and digitization efforts. Patty and Justin spoke about ICF’s work with utility demand-side management programs, especially the success they had helping the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO) with its demand side management programs and demand response. The firm runs over 150 such programs for 46 electric utilities in the US alone, Patty noted, and she and Justin helped us understand what steps they are using to find the best results in those programs as many of their utility clients are looking at how to evolve those programs to match where the industry is headed.
Opower is a behavioral energy efficiency company acquired a couple years ago by Oracle Utilities and that basically invented using behavioral science for the utility industry. The big recent headline about Opower was that late last year it reached a remarkable milestone - 20 terawatt hours (TWH) of energy saved for electric utility customers, up from 11 TWH saved at the time of the acquisition. Our guests were Marisa Uchin, vice president of global regulatory affairs and Julia Lundin, director of solution strategy for the Opower solution, both with Oracle Utilities. Both joined Oracle with the Opower acquisition and they explained how the company evolved from way back in the days when Uchin was employed at Pacific Gas & Electric doing energy efficiency programs and saw the brilliance of what this startup firm, now called Opower, was offering. We also heard what Oracle is planning to offer its utility clients next including peak savings and machine learning – that can detect when a customer buys a new EV and offer them deals and special utility rates.
Jared Lazerson is CEO of MGX Minerals, a firm that about a year ago bought ZincNyx, a company with a proprietary and very compelling zinc-air-flow electricity storage technology that combines a zinc-potassium electrolyte, an air scrubber to get the oxygen it needs, and separate charging and discharging components comprising a product that could be scaled up for a very affordable answer to the age-old problem of electricity storage for electric utilities and industries. The firm is scaling up production of the systems now to pair with solar deployments and the basic version can store close to a megawatt, he told us. It can deliver a week’s worth of power or even more and the potential for future scaling depends mostly on deploying containers of the electrolyte which, according to Lazerson, can be remarkably affordable. The technology is environmentally benign and virtually free of the risk of catching fire, too.
Marina Donovan is VP of global marketing and public affairs at Itron, one of the leading technology firms in the smart grid business, even more so for having acquired Silver Spring Networks at the very beginning of 2018, which is where Donovan worked previously and how she came to Itron. Donovan spoke to us about the impressive findings in a massive survey that demonstrated how utility customers see their relationship with their energy providers changing, and the kind of smart city, or as Donovan likes to call it, “smart community,” customers and their utilities want to create. She also spoke about how the Wi-SUN networking standard fits into the movement of open standards that has included Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and how many of the people behind those now classic standards are comitted to Wi-SUN.
LiveData Utilities President Brad Harkavy joined us to talk about his firm's software that lets utilities make use of the growing mountains of data they are generating via smart grid technology and distributed energy resources. He spoke to us about what his firm is accomplishing with some of its many utility clients including Green Mountain Power, and about how the industry is changing and how his firm’s products can play a key role for utilities that want to make the most of grid modernization.
Trove offers data analytics for the electric utility industry covering a wide range of end goals using what the firm calls its “solvers,” a collection of data processes that can open up tremendous value for the modern electric utility. The solvers cover many types of operations and he described several of them that are being used by the firm’s many utility clients in the US, including one that looks at drone photos of utility poles looking for cracked or burnt bells in a tiny fraction of the time it would take company personnel to peruse those pictures. Schultz had a long history working for utilities before joining Trove and his experience and insights offered a compelling look into what kind of untapped value the smart grid can offer.
Shuli Goodman is executive director and founder of LF Energy, the brand new energy and electric industry initiative of the Linux Foundation. LF Energy is dedicated to fostering multi-vendor collaboration and open-source innovation in the energy and electricity sectors. She believes the initiative can provide the governance and technical environment needed to enable massive decarbonization in the energy world.
Evan Caron is managing director and founder of Swytch, an energy blockchain firm that is a spinoff of the non-profit organization he also founded called the Token Commons Foundation. He spoke to us about how, after years of being an energy trader, he began to see the next big thing in energy was developing renewables and the energy blockchain and so he left his energy trading career to create Token Commons and then Swytch and start playing a key role in the vast changes brewing in the industry. Caron is a very smart, very rational voice on the financial side of the industry and he explained for us how he came to see the value of blockchain technology and became convinced it will play a critical role in the future of our now fast evolving industry.
Jon Stanford is a global director for industrial IOT and security services at Cisco. He’s in the customer experience or CX organization and is focused on utilities, oil & gas companies, transportation, and other big organizations. He brings to this job his experience having been a chief information security officer for an organization within the US Dept of Energy. Cisco wanted Stanford to talk to us about the cybersecurity services it offers the electric industry. One note about this talk is that it was recorded in late July in the same week of a report about Russian hackers having successfully hacked into electric utility computer networks. Stanford has worked with many of the electric industry cybersecurity experts we spoke to for our report on cybersecurity that we published in 2012, and he helped us understand how Cisco helps its customers secure their electric grids. He personally wants to see an official cybersecurity standards process created for the electric utility industry, too, and he explained how that could help us through a challenging process of protecting the grid.
Dr Kimberly McGrath, senior director of business development for Maxwell Technologies spoke to us about the truly amazing abilities of her firm’s ultracapacitor devices, energy storage systems with very different properties from batteries, such as the ability to store and release a megawatt of power in a typical rack-space cabinet, so much less space than the shipping containers we write about for battery deployments. That said, these systems are not batteries and they have other properties that make them extremely useful in grid and microgrid deployments and she helped us understand the technology which is itself not brand new but is finding its way into many more deployments these days.
The Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE) is developing a platform for energy management it hopes will help speed the move to transactive energy solutions to the problems caused by growing penetration of renewables across the world's electric grids, Christian Hoepfner, executive director of the center, explained in this episode.
Paul Donahue is chairman of MelRok, a firm that built an energy IOT gateway, using patented technology that MelRok created, and that uses artificial intelligence in the cloud to learn from and control any of a myriad of distributed energy resources. We have been reporting recently on the firm and some big successes such as cutting 20% of energy use in a project for the University of California. Donahue explained how the firm got its start and what its technology is about and why it maybe should be much bigger than his firm can offer as the energy industry starts to really embrace change.
Hugo van Nispen, CEO of Bridge Energy Group, a consultancy and systems integrator for electric utilities that specializes in smart grid implementation. He spoke to us about his perspective on where the utility industry needs to focus to increase the value it can receive from using smart grid technology. His firm recently shared the results of its 2018 Bridge Index Utility Industry Grid Modernization Survey that reaches over 20,000 utility executives, managers, and engineers in North America. The survey found 73% of the firms reached are modernizing compared with 52% in the version of the survey published last year (Survey report: https://www.bridgeenergygroup.com/challenges-we-solve/industry-insights/).
Patrick Lazar is VP of engineering for FreeWave Technologies, a firm that for many years has specialized in industrial radio communications for a variety of industries including electric utilities and the smart grid, and he spoke to us about the exciting new grid edge sensing and computing his firm’s technology offers, including sophisticated processing of video in remote locations and programming of and creation of proprietary user apps that his firm’s system makes so easy, just about anyone can create an app without special training...
Mike Henchen, a manager on the electricity team at Rocky Mountain Institute or RMI, a very well respected sustainability research and consultancy organization. He joined us to talk about the details in a report RMI created for Vermont electric utility Green Mountain Power about a residential demand response program the utility developed that includes sophisticated use of home batteries for grid balancing and utility cost savings, and about how RMI was engaged to advise the utility on how to bring about the best possible outcomes with the program.
EnergyHub CEO Seth Frader-Thompson and National Grid Vice President for New Energy Solutions Carlos Nouel described the recent expansion of National Grid’s ConnectedSolutions demand response program to include several new smart thermostats and other devices including battery energy storage for residential customers. EnergyHub is a provider of connected device and distributed energy resource management solutions (DERMS) for utilities and National Grid is the UK-based multinational energy firm with a significant electric utility presence in New England serving customers in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.
Bob Champagne is a senior VP at Innowatts, a firm that offers load disaggregation (load forecasting) and a machine learning analytics platform that includes a suite of predictive customer engagement solutions for energy providers and customers worldwide. He helped us understand how Innowatts is helping a variety of big energy users, marketers, and utilities improve the services they provide.
Jan Vrins is global energy practice leader for Navigant Consulting and his department recently released its latest whitepaper on what Navigant calls the "energy cloud," with this paper describing Energy Cloud version 4.0. Vrins shared some background on how we got to version 4.0 of this smart grid evolution and how his firm sees the future unfolding for his clients and for the industry as a whole - and a spoiler here, yes, it is all about distributed energy resources. He sees regulatory changes as the biggest hurdle to cross ahead, he told us.
We interviewed Sharon Allan, Chief innovation officer at the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA), a non-profit that represents diverse stakeholders including utilities, regulators, technology providers and financial organizations. SEPA works with its members to navigate the changes to become a more modern and cleaner power grid and recently started an advisory service for its members.
ICF is a global business management consultancy and Philip shared with us his perspective on where the electric industry is now in its transition from a ratemaking industry to one that is adopting the regulatory business models needed to incent a new vision for the industry.
Dan Belmont is senior director of energy and utilities at consultancy West Monroe Partners and authored recently a report titled “Signature Research: Managing Grid Modernization: Integrating IT and Operations at US Utilities.” He spoke to us about how his firm advises utilities to bring IT and OT together, and how to attract top talent to achieve the goals of an evolving industry.
NOTE: An article based on this interview with some quote excerpts is available for Smart Grid Today subscribers here: West Monroe reports to utilities on IT, OT convergence
We spoke recently to Dr Subramanian “Mani” Vadari about his new book that highlights the journey to electric utility 3.0 with solid examples and real-world case studies, titled, “Smart Grid Redefined: Transformation of the Electric Utility.” Dr Vadari is founder and president of what he described as a small strategy and management consulting firm called Modern Grid Solutions (MGS). The book has a 25% discount code available at http://us.artechhouse.com/Smart-Grid-Redefined-Transformation-of-the-Electric-Utility-P1944.aspx with the code VAD25.
Eaton Electrical Business Senior VP and CTO Michael Regelski spoke to us about cybersecurity for industrial control systems (ICS) and the technology firm's teamwork with Underwriter's Laboratory (UL). The Eaton cybersecurity research and testing facility in Pittsburgh is the first lab approved to participate in UL's Data Acceptance Program for cybersecurity and the program aligns Eaton's testing methodologies and data generation with the UL Cybersecurity Assurance Program for UL Standards 2900-1 and UL 2900-2-2.
Danny Waggoner of Advanced Energy Economy or AEE is senior manager of regulatory transformation and lead author of a report on regulatory models that AEE believes could help foster the modernization of the electric utility industry. AEE has many years of experience advocating for and studying regulatory policies in the industry and Danny was able to share with us details about what this report reveals. The 64-page report is available for free download: info.aee.net/aee_institute_utility_report
Edgard Capdevielle is CEO of Nozomi Networks, a very experienced firm offering cybersecurity for utility control networks and visibility into the assets of those networks for value beyond cybersecurity. We recently featured Nozomi Networks in the Smart Grid Today newsletter and our interview for the podcast delved into the experience Capdevielle's firm has with Enel and beyond and his perspective on how the industry is responding to cybersecurity concerns.
We interview Dan Cross-Call, a manager in the electricity practice at Rocky Mountain Institute, or RMI, a very well respected renewable energy think tank. Dan co-authored a recent report from RMI titled, “Reimagining the utility – Evolving the functions and business model of utilities to achieve a low-carbon grid.” Dan shared with us his organization’s vision for the utility industry along with some of the regulatory hurdles and breakthroughs that can help lead the way to a more modernized version of the electric industry.