utilities

“Well, I mean, I say often culture eats strategy, and I actually think what we have, we Is way more a cultural challenge than a technical challenge. So again, in my experience, there's no end, there's no, like, bottom to the rabbit hole you go down when what yo…”

“Very few utilities have great data on what's happening with the solar generation within their territory, for example. Most utilities don't directly meter that, so they can't really tell exactly what's happening with rooftop solar.”

“Most utilities are still working with software and data management systems that are kind of old school. They're still deploying software that goes on a really big server in the server room that's sort of on site with the utility. And that was state of the art …”

“Green Button and some of the other attempts, at the end of the day, they all suffer from poor customer experience, limited data availability Fairly weak service quality, and sometimes all three you know, wrapped and packaged and utilities were sort of promised…”

“So with the combination of Virginette, we're able to pull, again, you know, 52 countries, like 9000 utilities around the world.”

“There needs to be a single standard, and I actually see this as where the utilities role is, of, like, what is the single standard on a utilities distribution grid of the carbon intensity in an intraday period? Like, I think they should own that. Someone shoul…”

“And I think a lot of utilities mistakenly call EV growth as load growth. I think that simplifies it, because the load curves, both 24 hours and seasonally, look completely different. It's not more buildings. It's not more air conditioning. EVs charge different…”

“EVs charge a lot at night, they charge in the morning, so they're charged off-peak. So it's very profitable in that You don't have to build all this new infrastructure like there's new buildings. It's soaking up excess capacity of your transmission and distrib…”

“If you want to interconnect a battery or a solar panel or whatever to the utility today, they're going to look at the worst hour or when the most demand was on that line of the entire year and tell you if you're allowed to inject or not based on that.”

“You know, for many utilities, you still need a wet signature, certainly a signature that's returned back to the utility.”

“There is no way we are going to be able to do it without the participation of utilities.”

“And I think that utilities, like, their natural inclination is to be the railroad because that's the safe and it's the consistent thing that they've always done, and it's explainable to regulators, it's explainable to shareholders, to Wall Street, like, that, …”

“The promise is there and we'll absolutely get there. But there's just some significant challenges technology-wise to make sure that, you know, no, you're not going to throw out your Newton-Raphson power flow model tomorrow because we've got this cool AI. Like,…”

“In the V-I-G category, we actually have a half dozen programs in place right now where we've partnered with utilities, and we're using these vehicles that are already in the field in customers' hands and we're helping them use the vehicles to manage the load o…”

“My guess is that what we're going to see before too long is utility programs or state subsidy programs where where you're charging capacity or you, your utility rates are going to be charged relative to your participation in these types of programs.”

“We don't have any programs going with utilities for V to G mode, but I think the expectation in the industry is that what happens is these existing programs with utilities just roll right into V to G programs.”

“In 2018, I think most customers, most utilities, Felt really, really comfortable with the distribution transformer supply chain. They'd pick up the phone, or they'd, they'd shoot over a PO, and in anywhere from 12 to 14 weeks, that transformer was showing up o…”

“But this wasn't, this was not the microchip problem, right? That was preventing automobiles from being produced, where, where literally you couldn't get the Componentry, the necessary input to produce the output. This was the toilet paper example, right? Where…”

“You can reduce downtime Of some of these critical components by like, 30, 50%.”

“Anything that helps vegetation management, which utilities spend billions a year on collectively is interesting.”

“Utilities are starting to see that, yes, it's very difficult to get, you know, a gigawatt of multi-day storage today, but in a few years, and certainly by the early twenty-thirties, they're going to want gigawatts of multi-day storage as a compliment to their …”

“The first thing that utilities are planning to build to manage their entry into the gauntlet is they're planning to not retire their coal power plants on previously agreed upon or decided upon timelines.”

“And if they don't change those utilities that don't change them, they'll go bankrupt.”

“If you're saying you're going to build a gigawatt data center, Or you're holding on to a gigawatt of power in a queue position. At some point, you need to be able to point to billions of dollars of capital that you have access to build out that infrastructure.…”

“Many utilities are dealing with legacy systems that weren't designed for modern cybersecurity in mind. You know, so to follow a standard that was built in, you know, 1015 years ago where cloud technologies were not being leveraged and trying to shoehorn that i…”

“In most cases, what we're seeing is utilities giving either first priority to backup to a customer in an outage event, or some sort of residual charge, like say, you know, the customer gets a guaranteed access to 20% or 50% of the battery or the fuel.”

“Being in real conversations with real utilities and regulators right now about, okay, which feeder? It is amazing in some ways how they're just starting to do some of that thinking and modeling.”

“The first layer of a distributed capacity procurement is just asking a utility to be a utility, which is plan how much it needs to generate and move electricity where it needs it and what type of assets would do that and then go Buy them and put them into the …”

“What we've seen work in the first procurements that we've, as Sparkfund, have helped the utilities deploy is a hosting agreement where you go to a customer and say, can we put this asset on your building? And we will pay you. We will rent the space from you an…”

“Smart meters have been around for 15 years, so in my business, I guess we get a little anxious to, or eager to see utilities change quickly, but in truth, a lot of even large utilities today, particularly, say, in the Northeast, are just now getting their smar…”

“Most utilities have some sort of net zero or close to net zero goal, but that goal is in 2030, 2040, 20 50, out sometime, and so thinking about what that demand flexibility is needed to meet that new supply stack is still being figured out, and we're in very m…”

“And certainly, so we're seeing that more and more, I think, as awareness of data centers and AIs growing, and there, people are starting to hear that that requires a lot of electricity. They become more interested in utilities.”

“So utilities show some resistance. Often one of the difficulties we have is that our customers want to be fast followers. And in order to be fast followers, you need to follow someone. So someone has to go first. That's definitely an issue in this sector in pa…”

“There's only so much connection capacity in the system and the ability to sort of expand connection capacity is reliant on utilities who are then in turn reliant on the regulatory commissions to give them authority to build new things. And the timescales at wh…”

“You know, what I hear from utilities now is what I heard from utilities back in the past, right, is that, you know, they fundamentally can't take development risk. And, you know, that's a, having done fossil plant development, I did that for 15 years of coal a…”

“I don't think there is a lot of new merchant gas being developed. Mostly what's happening is it's other utilities saying we need it for, cause we need more capacity or it's data centers and there'll be the longterm offtake on the project.”

“There's a second business, which is we are a technology provider to the utilities, and, you know, two-thirds of the country, as you know, is a regulated market where there are incumbent utilities that have kind of service territories and monopolies, and we are…”

“Now it's a resource because of that repeatability that you can use operationally, and you can be confident that if you need to use it, you know, today I think maybe dozens of times per year, but moving toward hundreds of times per year, that repeatability just…”

“In March, we actually hit a significant milestone in agreements with utilities for a gigawatt of demand response across our fleet.”

“We like behind the meter if it means that we get the capacity up most quickly, but we're always going to look to invest with the utilities to bring the transmission. Maybe it's a year after. Maybe it's two years after, right?”

“Utilities now are asking multi-billion dollar commitments for gigawatts gigawatts of power. Turbines and so on and so forth is the same thing. So yes, pretty massive disadvantage.”

“In some jurisdictions where, ah, utilities are compensating, ah, resources for providing peak shaving in the 200 to 300 kW, ah, per season, ah, range. You know, for a 10 k, kW bidirectional charging system, you could potentially earn, you know, 3000 dollars pe…”

“And so, in some ways, I would say the utilities are actually adapting their people and processes around the limitations of the analytics, intelligence, and decision-making frameworks that they have.”

“But I will admit a little bit of frustration with a particular crowd That is constantly referencing the, quote, broken grid, unquote, that needs fixing, knowing full well that most of these people have absolutely no idea how utilities actually work.”

“Currently, there is no closed-loop feedback until you have a post-mortem. You have a, an event that drives an investigation that needs to be reported back up to FERC.”

“The grid is getting so congested that if we do worst case scenario all the time we are, the utilities are beginning to struggle to find time to take the grid into contingency for planned work.”

“We're now seeing the first, like, announcements from utilities of going to regulators and requesting rate decreases as a result of large loads in their territory. We've seen a few of those now.”

“Two-thirds of the expenditures they're making today across utilities are non-negotiable, and it's, Has nothing to do with growth, right? All that stuff would be happening even if the data center, boom, were not happening. And so, all that stuff is getting more…”