Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards (Part 4)

SM: What did you do after you left CellNet?

CE: I started another company to build applications under the networks. When CellNet went bankrupt, that relationship split. We always knew that utilities would need more data, efficiency with the data, and improvements based on the data at some point. The challenge was when and what would be the driver. In 2001 and 2002, the energy crisis in California forced regulators to focus on the issue and ask how they could fix the problem. They recognized that energy efficiency was important to them, and that was a game changer.

We had developed an enormous amount of domain expertise, having rolled out 10 million devices. We had a unique skill set, so I assembled the key members of the CellNet team to do it one more time. We used what we learned building a business that was anticipating the market’s changing.

With that group back together, we started eMeter with the premise that people were building communication infrastructures and the world was different today. We did not want to be in the hardware business at the house because those things would be commodities. Quite frankly, the challenge we had at CellNet was how to make the data useful.

SM: Were you assuming that the data was available?

CE: You have to assume that it can be made available at a reasonable price. We focused on capturing the data when it came out of the fire hose and manipulating it for the utilities so it could be utilized by their legacy systems. A utility can install a very complex data infrastructure that brings back terabytes of data from millions of distributed endpoints. They have legacy billing systems that have difficulty cutting a bill once a month, so there is certainly no place to put the data.

We built an extremely robust enterprise middleware package. It ended up being called Meter Data Management for lack of a better name. That is a tiny subset of what we actually do. There are probably 15 companies out there worldwide who built the infrastructures. We are communication system agnostic, so we will support whichever of those 15 companies a utility company elects to put in the field. Our position is that 10 years from now, the meters and communication systems will be different than they are today. You need to protect the enterprise and application layer from changes down below, so we built the system to support multiple communication systems in a service territory.

We then have embedded business processes to make all of this stuff work. The difficulty is not in the individual meter transaction, it is in the volume. When you get millions of points you need to have embedded business processes. That has allowed us to integrate into the work management systems, outage monitoring systems, billing systems and customer service systems.

SM: You are essentially providing a master data management system to make the data accessible by upstream applications. Is that a fair summary?

CE: Yes. The view for us is to get the data to both the utility and the user.

SM: You provide the utility with consumer interfaces?

CE: They should be able to, but the infrastructure is not always in place to support that. We have built systems wherein consumers can go online and see what their load is like and how their consumption compares with their neighbors. The idea is to make energy use more transparent to the end user. If you make the data available to smart people inside the utility, and if you make the right data available to the consumer, then the right decisions will be made regarding the use of energy. We believe that would allow other marketplaces to develop. Solar energy would then be cost-justifiable if the wholesale price of energy were made available to the consumer instead of the customer just paying the average.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards
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