Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards (Part 7)

SM: Most public utility commissioners are appointed to their positions and are not energy experts. Who educates them?

CE: They are dependent on their staff and on the utilities themselves.

SM: That could be problematic if the utilities do not want to see change. I am not convinced they have motivation to change if they are guaranteed 12.5%. Commissioners are going to have to find other sources for their education.

CE: When commissioners do come up with interesting initiatives, utilities are not able to support them in volume. They can do small trials, but nothing to scale. They must be able to characterize the load, track it, and reconcile it with everything else. The exception to that is if everything is completely off the grid.

SM: For the alternative energy dream to come true, utilities will need to be a part of it.

CE: Sometimes we focus too much on consumers and not on the end user. Walmart wants to do something special with energy in all of their stores. In an ideal world, Walmart will hit a website and see their entire energy portfolio, and the portfolio should be accurate within minutes.

SM: So they are a consumer of your product lineup?

CE: Yes, but they are doing it with one-off things right now. They can’t do it through the utilities yet because not all of the data is there. Eventually, however, information will be available.

SM: If Walmart puts in solar panels everywhere and mitigates a portion of their energy with solar, and there is a policy that says that companies that do so will receive a credit, then they need to account for how much they are generating.

CE: There is another benefit. I believe that if you can account for it you will not need subsidies. It will simply make business sense, and it will pay for itself. This would change consumer habits as well. One of the biggest loads during the day is the refrigerator. If they made a refrigerator that did thermal storage, and you use that to keep the refrigerator cool during the day instead of running compressor cycles, you could cut its energy use by 90%. It would take no time for GE to do that if there were actually a market for it. But there is no market for it, because there is no incentive for the consumer to avoid using peak power because the price is all the same.

SM: Let’s talk about the teams surrounding Obama. What is your sense of their awareness of these issues?

CE: I know Obama has a lot of bright people looking at the problem. There is too much attention on the artificial stimulation of innovation and not enough attention on fixing the base infrastructure to support a marketplace for that innovation. What Obama should do is come out and say, “I want every customer to have access to their energy usage in five years so they can make purchase decisions based on real energy information.”

SM: How do people who are selling solar panels today justify the ROI?

CE: I really don’t know. I have not done it myself. I think a lot of people who by it are conscious consumers who want to do something good. I believe the payoff for those things is 15 years. There might be some subsidies as well.

If the wholesale price of energy was presented to the consumer and you saw .80/kilowatt hour at noon, then you would put a solar panel up because that is when the sun is out. Air conditioners drive the peaking issues. Every air conditioner should be installed with a solar panel.

SM: I have a bunch of solar companies coming in soon so I will dig more on these issues.

CE: There are people who work for me who understand these issues a lot more than I do. I would be more than happy to introduce you. They can share with you the history of policy, what Obama is doing, and all of that stuff.

SM: Thank you for your time and insights.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards
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