Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards (Part 6)

SM: How do you conduct sales?

CE: We sell directly and through system integrators. IBM has sold us into several of their accounts. Accenture has sold us in Europe.

SM: Who is the competition in your space? Are there any other players?

CE: The guys who make the metering hardware make a subset of our software to support their hardware and get it plugged into billing systems. We compete with them on accounts. If a utility is building out for all of their customers, then we win 90% of those cases.

Other potential competition comes from the companies selling the next generation of legacy systems. That would be SAP, Oracle with their SPL products, and so forth. At both the metering end and the system integration end, there are gray areas where everyone is still trying to determine what goes where. We, quite frankly, do not care where it goes as long as it is accounted for.

When you get millions of devices operating daily the challenge becomes managing exceptions. If you end up with a large exception log you will never catch up. All of that has to be automated. We work with SAP and they recommend us into their accounts. Nobody has recognized the problem in the same way that we have. We started with a clean sheet of paper for this particular problem and solved it.

SM: From where you sit today, and considering the decades you have spent in the energy business, when you look at the energy market, where are we going?

CE: The price of oil will change over time. The supply and demand relationship will change over time. The most important thing for the industry is to tie together the basics where supply and demand are represented through the marketplace by price. Market forces should be allowed to dictate what makes sense in terms of technology and innovation. We need to create natural marketplaces where smart people can do things to create and innovate.

SM: Things such as variable pricing and carbon content need to drive the market.

CE: And it needs to be a functional marketplace. The information that would allow it to function does not exist today, for good reasons.

SM: That is because the information infrastructure  needed to support information driven regulation does not exist today.

CE: If someone came out with an incredible electric vehicle, today’s grid could not support it. You have to be able to track it, manage it, implement it and bill it. Israel has recognized this. They are building infrastructure to support electric cars. We don’t have that here. If you have the information you can build it. Nothing being developed in clean tech separates the end user from the utility. It is going to coexist because you are not leaving the grid. In order to allow it to coexist you have to monitor, bill it, and in some cases control it remotely in order to ensure the grid does not collapse.

One of the big drivers in Finland is their enormous amount of wind power. That is a big challenge because you have a lot of distributed facilities putting energy onto the grid.

SM: Is that energy characterized as wind power? If I am a regulator and I need to figure out how to develop and implement new energy policy, then I would like to know what energy was created with solar power versus bio fuel, at which time I could provide utilities tax break incentives.

CE: The state of the regulator right now is that they know they want wind power and they are depending on the utility to deal with it. Regulators do not understand that it is incredibly difficult for utilities to deal with.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards
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