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Apr 13, 2009 Join the Discussion 1 Active Comment(s)
I was off last week to give talks at Senator Maria Cantwell's National Smart Grid Conference in Spokane, Washington, and at the annual Comverge Users Meeting in Houston, Texas.
In most of my keynotes, I focused on actionable trends. I try to keep people ahead of the curve, warning them of upcoming changes in time to prepare and gain a competitive edge.
This time, however, I spoke about something less tangible but no less important. I believe we need to undertake a remaking of the American power grid. This effort will be no less comprehensive than the rural electrification initiative of the previous century. But to succeed, I believe we need to make a shift in our thinking.
I've been hinting at this for a while, as you can see by taking a look at my previous comments on the advent of the Electricity Economy. And plenty of other folks share my basic premise, notably Peter Huber, who recently authored The Million Volt Answer to Oil for the Manhattan Institute. If you want to see the latest evolution in my thinking, follow the links below, where I posted an article and a PDF copy of some of the slides from my talks.
The Electricity Economy (PDF)
The Million Volt Answer to Oil
Jesse’s address to the Smart Grid Conference
Four Keys to Managing Smart Grid Evolution
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Mar 9, 2009 Join the Discussion 3 Active Comment(s)
Well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has moved from botching biofuels to bungling the Smart Grid.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Khosla claimed that building new transmission lines is “10 times more important” than the Smart Grid. He says we need those lines to bring energy from remote wind farms to urban areas.
Khosla doesn't know enough about electric power to understand that just building new transmission will make the problem worse. Unless those new transmission lines are hooked into a Smart Grid, they will simply destabilize our system. Today¹s utility distribution systems cannot cope with massive amounts of intermittent renewable energy. In April 2008, for instance, fluctuating winds nearly brought down the Texas grid on two separate occasions.
Khosla's bone-headed pronouncement is about as smart as building an Interstate Highway System without exit ramps and city streets. Sure, the 18-wheelers could move lots of freight back and forth – but they couldn't get it where it was needed without crashing through concrete barriers and offroading it to each delivery.
Khosla originally became famous (and wealthy) at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the iconic Silicon Valley venture firm that backed Google and Amazon. More recently, he has become infamous (and less wealthy) through a series of wrong-headed investments in biofuels.
Now running his own firm, Khosla made early bets on biofuels that (1) were based on inefficient first-generation technologies that create a food-versus-fuel conundrum or (2) have not been able to scale to commercial size or (3) both.
I say: Fix the biofuel mess first, Mr. Khosla, before messing with the Smart Grid.
Wall Street Journal discussion with Khosla and other VCs
Business Insider report on Khosla’s remarks
Khosla Ventures home page
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We often consult to investors looking for advice on new sectors of opportunity. About five years ago, I briefed a VC firm about the potential in clean energy in general and Smart Grid in particular. (I was country before country was cool.)
Two months ago I got a call from one of the partners. They had indeed invested in a Smart Grid company. To be more accurate, they had invested in an adjacent sector, and then realized that the firm had great potential for Smart Grid applications.
The company is called Tropos. Over at SmartGridNews.com, I tell the story of why and how it could become a leader in Smart Grid communications, bypassing established firms that have been trying to crack the sector for years. Click the link below to read the full story.
SGN's Vendor Watch story on Tropos Networks Join the Discussion
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UtilityAMI group approves new home networking specifications. UtilityAMI is a task force for the development of open standards for advanced metering. Supported by the California Energy Commission and others, it builds high-level guidelines that can become the basis of open standards. The group has now approved specifications for home area networks (HANs). Those specifications help answer the question of how advanced meters should connect to the home networks of the future. If utilities and vendors can target an open standard, they don’t have to write their own interfaces for each different flavor of HAN, thereby lowering both the cost and the risk.
QuickTake: At first glance, a technical standards announcement might not seem like big news. Until you realize that the electric power industry is transforming to open standards. For both utilities and vendors, it is crucial to monitor standards as they gel over the next 18 months and to get on board early. For an object lesson, look at the traction Silver Spring has gotten by virtue of its early support for Internet protocols.
UtilityAMI home page
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BPL Global adds to its Smart Grid portfolio with transformer monitoring. As the initials in its name attest, Pittsburgh-based BPL Global started out emphasizing broadband over powerline, aka BPL. Like rival Current Group, it discovered that BPL is problematic, and switched to emphasizing the things it can build on top of BPL (or on top of almost any communications network). In January, it acquired Portland-based Serveron, maker of innovative transformer monitoring products. BPL Global has now broadened its offerings with power transformer bushing monitoring, courtesy of Serveron technology.
QuickTake: We’ve been saying for a while that distribution and substation automation would get hot in 2009. Advanced metering and demand response will continue to be important, but the long-term total solution for utilities will include distribution automation on the same platform. BPL Global gets it. Let’s see how quickly its competitors catch on.
BPL Global press release
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General Electric snaps up Irish Smart Grid firm. General Electric appears to be firming up its product line to take a higher profile in the Smart Grid space. It has just acquired Kelman, Ltd. for an undisclosed sum, calling it “an excellent fit” with GE’s overall Smart Grid initiative. Although Kelman sells a variety of products, including traditional gear, it is notable for remote monitoring of transformers, along the lines of the equipment from BPL Global subsidiary Serveron (see story below).
QuickTake: Eighteen months ago, SGN predicted the Smart Grid sector would see consolidation starting in the 2nd half of 2008. Although we doubt they did it just to make us look good, here is General Electric right on cue.
businessGreen.com article and analysis
Kelman home page
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“Flashy” energy dashboard from
Silver Spring and Greenbox. Silver Spring Networks has teamed with Greenbox Technology to build an energy management dashboard for customers of Oklahoma Gas & Electric. Silver Spring provided the network infrastructure. Greenbox – founded by the man who created the Flash multimedia technology that is now ubiquitous on the Internet – provided the easy-to-use Web interface. The dashboard lets customers see when and where they are using energy with visualizations and email alerts. It lets utilities reduce demand (through efficiency) and shift peak loads through demand response.
QuickTake: The grid space is seeing an influx of talent from the computing and Internet industries. Watching these aggressive, savvy startups take on the staid electric power industry is like watching the U.S.A. Dream Team play basketball against a squad from the local retirement community.
Greenbox press release
Silver Spring home page
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Trilliant latest Smart Grid company to get big VC dollars. Following in the footsteps of GridPoint, BPL Global and Silver Spring Networks, Trilliant Incorporated has secured $40M in venture financing from MissionPoint Capital and zouk ventures. The Redwood, CA-based company is best known for its mesh networking communications infrastructure. Increasingly, however, it is emphasizing the solutions it can build on top of that infrastructure, including demand response and meter data management.
QuickTake: With a team of veterans from related industries, Trilliant is one grid firm that sees where things are headed. All the more so since its new VC partners are amongst the brightest around. Expect it to joust with Gridpoint to become a de facto platform for managing the Smart Grid. That coveted position is still up for grabs since many of the logical platform providers – Areva, ABB, Siemens – don’t understand that the grid sector is now more like the PC market of the 80s or the Internet market of the 90s than the traditional utility sector of the 60s and 70s.
Speaking of people that don’t get it, you might ask yourself this: If the Silicon Valley VCs are as smart as they think they are, why did they lose this opportunity in their own backyard to rival investors from Connecticut and London? I guess it’s easy to get distracted when you are busy shooting yourself in the foot with braindead biofuels deals.
Trilliant press release
MissionPoint Capital home page
zouk ventures home page
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Re:Mr Andersons concerns
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