utilities

“Often interconnecting, as wonky as this is, interconnecting a lot of projects can just make them not pencil out because of the cost of the utilities exact on the renewable energy industry.”

“The economic stakes are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Today, gas stations and utilities sell roughly the same dollar amount of fuel and electricity, but the balance could shift dramatically toward utilities as more electric vehicles hit the roads.”

“So I think a critique that you can make of the clean energy industry writ large, this is generalizing a little bit, but there's a lot of companies that are very good at tackling these thorny, wonky, Really complicated grid problems, engineering problems, desig…”

“That's profit that's built into shareholder expectations. Now you're asking them to shut that down. That creates a lot of uncertainty. Is the regulator going to continue allowing me to earn on an asset that's no longer operating? Like the regulatory standard i…”

“Selling distributed AI to utilities is harder than actually executing the AI because they, and everybody who sells and works with utilities knows that their historic incentives are not pro-innovation, not pro-software, not pro-future-proofing investments, and …”

“We put forward a bill last year in addition to what Senator Becker did. It was authored by Senator Becker's colleague in the South Bay, Mark Berman, and it was, I believe it's AB six 43, but it would basically require that the Public Utilities Commission penal…”

“We were seeing these integrations take five, seven years. And then if every utility kind of goes at the pace we were going at, and then says, well, we're going to build our DERMs over the next five years. I just started adding up the numbers. I was like, we're…”

“Utilities have more data than all of our peer industries. We have more data in our segment than healthcare, than finance. They would be jealous of our data sets, and yet we make some of the least use of our data of any industry”

“Outcomes, business insights, they're a function of compute in close proximity to data. Like, compute in close proximity to data is where you're going to get the results that you're really looking for.”

“And I think the challenge with those models and those biases getting into the models is that all the things that we're trying to get away, those inefficiencies we all talk about getting away from, like over-planning, over-forecasting, having over-capacity on c…”

“It's probably one of the biggest challenges to the DER industry, which is trust from the utility and regulator side on embracing DERs and really accepting them as a reliable resource, whether it's for capacity or for localized capacity I think getting, establi…”

“Like, I can tell you, right now, here in New York, utilities couldn't go and just market. If I know you have an EV, I couldn't just go and market people saying, here's a great rate for you that can save you money. Even though it's a good thing for customers, t…”

“And so I think what you'll end up seeing is utilities recognizing the value that they can get out of these VPPs and procuring VPPs directly.”

“The tranche sizes each year that you're having to go out and procure are now being measured in the gigawatt scale. So you're no longer immaterial to utilities load forecast. In fact, in many cases, you are the utilities load forecast.”

“What I've seen is that often it can take three months or six months or nine months to get access to all the right data, such as smart meter data for your customer, and then only a couple of weeks or a couple of months to actually build and deploy a predictive …”

“So something specific I've seen work very well is to embed teams of data scientists and software engineers with the lines of business. So to make sure that somebody who is a data scientist is actually sitting with a trader for a week, or sitting with the grid …”

“I think the amount of utilities that have fully productionized use cases for AI live is relatively small.”

“I've seen some utilities in their integrated resource plans mention Growth of two X, five X, even 10 X in the next decade, driven primarily by more data center build out.”

“Since restructuring in the mid nineties R&D expenditure fell by about 75%.”

“What's going to end up happening is you're going to have a bunch of companies say, here's my one piece of hardware, here's a hundred million piece of software attached to that piece of hardware, buy my hardware, and get a hundred million dollars of software th…”

“If you are Going to continue to operate in the sort of traditional paradigm of the grid side looks at the grid, and the customer side looks at customers. We're never going to make the kind of progress and scale the way that we want to.”

“I think, ah, utilities have been remarkable at the ability to integrate clean resources. I think you know, we just gotta be able to get more online, and there are some fundamental constraints to that within our existing grid.”

“So I think there is Some reason to believe that the timing of the kind of panic conversation around load growth in addition to the proposed new combined cycle plants could, you know, have something to do with those proposed EPA rules.”

“Look, frankly, not a lot of people use those portals. I think there's pretty well defined metrics that these haven't got a lot of use.”

“And there's still decisions being made for a previous generations of meters.”

“When you think about the normal course of business for most utilities is to build more natural gas plants, Build more transmission and build more distribution. Today, that formula results in 10% rate increases every year. That is not workable.”

“Taking carbon out of the supply of energy will only work if grid operators have the flexibility with respect to demand to meet this new supply stack that, that utilities are building.”

“We have seen a lot of interesting attempts to innovate rates over the last two decades, and a lot of them unfortunately fall in the category of doing a checklist. Oh, we're going to offer a time of use rate, but we don't know how to design it properly so custo…”

“Why, why lead with the higher price? Lead with the lower price. I mean, that's like marketing one A, right? But we somehow, because of the cost of service mindset, can't seem to understand it. But all of us, our customers who go to Macy's, Nordstrom's, and Saf…”

“And one of the things that's nice about how utilities think is while they Do tend to move slowly initially. They're also not in competition with one another, which means that when they do find something that works and is repeatable, they talk to one another an…”

“As we get to more of the phase that we're maybe entering in now in the life cycle of our company, where we have a number of proof points and we know that the category is well understood, we don't necessarily have to engage with innovation departments in order …”

“One thing that we've recognized is that at the end of the day, utilities are not going to adopt something because a pilot was successful in and of itself, nor are they going to adopt it because the technology is interesting or cool.”

“Increasingly the one that we see Most often is around load growth when there's potentially new commercial load growth happening in their service territory. The last thing they want to do is to say, you know, we don't have that capacity. We're essentially turni…”