Smart Grid Today Podcast

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.