Smart Grid Today Podcast

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 a

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

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.