Smart Grid Today Podcast

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.