Electric Utilities

“So studies today, I would say half if not more of the time, especially for distribution, is on cleaning up data.”

“I think most utilities are talking about six to nine months to perform one of those studies, and it's a one-time, right, so risk of restudies will compound that, and it does cost internal utility, typically a hundred, A couple of 100,000 dollars. The typical b…”

“I think the single biggest dollar short, it's not clear when, that one will be able to make, will be on these utilities, because if any version of what we just talked about happens, And all of a sudden, you have private homeowners that are their own utility, a…”

“So it does take some work to get it, and you're right, no one's done it at a, at any real scale yet but I think we're gonna see it pretty soon.”

“We will see a more abundance of technology-specific rates. I'm thinking about heat pumps, batteries. Certainly we have EV rates are quite ubiquitous at this point.”

“One, Everything needs to be opt out. This notion that we need to spend 700 dollars to, like, talk to people and beg them to opt into something is looney tunes. Like, when you hook up something, it's automatically opted into a VPP, and then we should give you a…”

“Let's try to actually move to actual implementation, and my advice is you don't really need to do a pilot because we already have 400 pilots across the globe.”

“Our estimates is that this would cost roughly thirty-five million dollars per utility to put all the software layers in place from the venture-backed companies that have created them to be able to, you know, actually fully integrate this whole suite, right?”

“Because the thing that I think people that work in this industry understand, but most people don't understand, is when a utility says that they don't have power, they don't mean that most of the time there's not power. They just mean there might be a handful o…”

“One of the areas that's challenging is the explainability of it. When you're training these models, you're trying to get them to do what they do, and then they go make decisions. It's really hard to kind of backtrace, like, why did you make decision X versus w…”

“Historically, the action and the money and the competition was at the bulk part of the system, and so the last mile was sort of the sleepy last mile infrastructure. That's about to invert, where you have all this activity, you have mobile batteries, you have e…”

“Now I would say 10 years ago, there's probably like 10%. I think we're probably maybe, you know, up to 30% of the systems that are fully built in the distribution.”

“Not many utilities have their secondary modeled. Not many utilities know exactly which customers are connected to which transformer and which transformer is connected To which circuit, and which circuit is connected to which substation.”

“And the goal, I think, is by 20, 25, 26, right, when OPG is in full construction for there to be 20 orders that come in, right, and I think I think once that happens, then I think all the electric utilities will come very quickly, because they have a huge amou…”

“Our utilities love their capital in the rate base. They don't love quite so much cheap things that can solve problems without a lot of capital in the rate base. So that's the problem with grid enhancing technologies.”

“My, I was on the line with my CTO the other day, and we are now making a tool so that some of our customers, which are these electric utilities, Can use chatbots to configure software that lets them communicate with DER and procure services from them.”

“One of the things that we've seen go into place in places like Hawaii and Australia, where this is also an issue, is that you'll start to see limitations on how much solar can go in, whether that's limiting new installs or limiting the size of the install. You…”

“Most utilities have had some form of demand response program in place for, you know, 10, 2030 years, but typically up until now they were really only participated in by very, very large customers because the mechanism actually was calling people on the phone t…”

“In the United States, very much so in many jurisdictions throughout the country, certainly in the utility space, it's seen as a threat, not an opportunity, and so when you see it that way, there's more and more hurdles that get created to go through for a cust…”

“You also have the prospects of PG&E where there's a generalized belief that it'd be a nice thing if there's a forest fire to have the utility take on all of the liability of consequential damages after a fire. So long as their power station was responsible for…”

“It's interesting because I think the listed view is quite valuable in sentiment, and so often in talking with the CIO, my key question to him is, what's your sentiment right now? Because it gives some test of where exuberance is or isn't in some of the sectors…”