Smart Grid Today Podcast

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.