Latest / Clean Power Hour / How AI and Data are Transforming Power Grids with Astrid Atkinson | Ep177

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How AI and Data are Transforming Power Grids with Astrid Atkinson | Ep177 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Astrid Atkinson: More, in order to move to that real time operations model, you need really good visibility, and you need it without having to re instrument everything. So that's a place where software technology can be really helpful. Firstly, you gotta You need big data, you need to be able to use the cloud and utilities don't mostly today, although that's changing, you need all the data, you need to make sense of it in real time, you need to be able to look back over years and look at trends.
• 1:14
  Astrid Atkinson: You need to never throw it away.
• 1:17
  Astrid Atkinson: And that's not what utilities do today. You need that technology that we've already developed.
• 1:22
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts, Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar batteries and clean technologies every week, want to go deeper into decarbonisation? We do two, we're here to help you understand command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get together we can speed the energy transition.
• 1:51
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, zero carbon grid orchestration, we're gonna find out what that is. My guest today is Astrid Atkinson. She is the founder and CEO of a startup called Camus energy. Welcome to the show.
• 2:05
  Astrid Atkinson: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
• 2:06
  Tim Montague: Really nice to meet you last week, looking forward to learning more about camo and what you're up to in the world. give our listeners a little background on yourself.
• 2:16
  Tim Montague: How did you get interested in the energy transition?
• 2:19
  Astrid Atkinson: Yeah, happy to.
• 2:19
  Astrid Atkinson: So my background is on the software technology side. I was at Google from about 2004, and was really fortunate to be part of the early team that was helping to develop the kind of large scale cloud computing approach that helped to build Google to what it became. In particular, I lead up a lot of Google's early work on building highly reliable systems at global scale. So we kind of think about the transition to the cloud is going from putting software on like one computer, to putting it on 10,000. And having them work as reliably or more reliably than the one did.
• 2:57
  Astrid Atkinson: There's a fair amount of software and kind of operational approach to getting those 10,000 or 100,000, things to work reliably together. That was my field of expertise. So that was kind of what I led up at Google.
• 3:10
  Astrid Atkinson: And as I was kind of working through that, and thinking about applications of that type of technology kind of elsewhere in the world. I was also getting interested in climate change and climate and energy transition.
• 3:31
  Astrid Atkinson: My son is 10 now, but it was really around the time that he was born that I started to think about climate and the future that he would be inheriting from us. And it was when I realized that he was going to be 37 and 2050. And that, you know, if anyone was going to be addressing climate change, and really trying to fix the problem, before it became disastrous for all of us, it was my generation and not his that was really what got me kind of set on the idea of transitioning my career into the climate and energy space. And so it's been a long time thinking about where my specialty, which is very reliable, large scale computing, would fit into the energy transition space. And that's how I got interested in the grid, which is what we work with.
• 4:20
  Tim Montague: And what is the problem that Camus is solving?
• 4:25
  Astrid Atkinson: Yeah, so we're fundamentally firstly, we're a Software and Systems Company. So we provide software, we work with utilities. And more specifically, if you think about the role of the grid in the energy transition, it's pretty fundamental part of the kind of two part story about how we decarbonize our energy system.
• 4:45
  Astrid Atkinson: And broadly speaking, there's kind of the two steps of electrify everything, and then decarbonize the grid, grids a really important part of that step two, and it's underinvested. From a technology perspective, it's also not nearly able to manage the volume of energy that we'll need to move across it in order to get all of that energy electrified.
• 5:07
  Astrid Atkinson: And we don't have that long to build physical infrastructure.
• 5:11
  Astrid Atkinson: So we're fortunate to already have a pretty big physical network that connects all sources of generation to most sources of demand. But we needed to work really differently. We needed to be really smart, we needed to be really efficient, and we needed to be not sort of infinitely expensive in order to play that role. And so that's what we do from a software perspective is work with the people who manage the grid, which is primarily utilities, to provide them with the data and management and orchestration capabilities to get all of those sources of generation and sources of demand working while All together to be able to address that problem at a systemic level.
• 5:57
  Tim Montague: Well, that's interesting, I am a little cautious because I am a solar professional. And we often run into utilities as a barrier to the energy transition, not an accelerant. There are many people who want to simply disrupt the utilities and completely reinvent the grid, because it is a wonderful machine. But it's largely outdated. As you mentioned, it's not built to carry three times as much electricity, which is what we need it to do. It's not built to handle distributed energy resources, like solar, wind and battery storage. And but but more importantly, it often, like becomes a major source of friction, right for InterConnection, and permitting, and getting projects across the finish line and making them financial and affordable. And speeding the energy transition, which is our mission here at the Clean Power Hour. So what do you say to that? And, and like, how do you affect change with the wind, when you're serving the utilities, I get it that, that they're going to need better and smarter tools, and we need a smarter grid. But is that disruption or that progress, so to speak, really going to come from them buying a better software platform?
• 7:24
  Astrid Atkinson: Well, so the good plays a really critical role. It's true that utilities can be one of the bigger hurdles and getting clean energy projects off the ground. But they're also the grids also the major enabler for getting that energy to the places where it's used, the physical connectivity that we would need to be able to get the output from all of those solar projects, or wind projects or whatever, to my house or yours or your business or whatever. It's basically the grid. It's not perfect, it isn't what we need it to be, it isn't nearly as smart or as large or as easy to connect to, as it's going to need to be that it is there. And that's a pretty good start. We want those wires. So we want those means of moving energy around, then at some point, you're either going to connect them to the network that exists or build a new one. There is absolutely, I think, a really important role for more localized energy and getting more energy being generated at the places where it's also being consumed. And I think it's more of an end than an or kind of answer, though. We need all of those things together or we're not going to solve this. To answer the other part of your question, though, about the role of the utility and the the the opportunity to innovate in the grid landscape as it is today.
• 8:42
  Astrid Atkinson: There's a couple of things that I think are really important.
• 8:47
  Astrid Atkinson: Firstly, the grid, as it stands provides a universal access to energy. And that role is really important. If we think about the opportunity for getting local energy and to consumers at my house or your house, maybe we have solar on our roofs. I think my house was a kind of an interesting example. I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains outside of the Bay Area, we're actually having pretty significant reliability challenges here at the edges of the network with climate change accelerating. And because I have resources and I work in a clean energy industry, I have solar panels of nine kilowatts of solar panels on my garage roof. And this last winter, we had about 45 days of power outage which is quite a lot. I had a battery project that was in progress. And it came online at the tail end of that long difficult winter for myself and all of my neighbors and it fix the problem exactly and only for me. I went from you know being in a situation where I and all my neighbors were busy cutting, you know, chain, sawing logs and running the woodstove and all of those kinds of things to not losing power ever. And I fix the problem 100% For me and for my house. But it didn't fix it for my friends who live next door. It didn't fix it for my neighbors down the road. It didn't fix it for the old lady who lives a couple doors up on the highway.
• 10:14
  Tim Montague: So when you say when you say you solve the problem for yourself, you installed a 30 kilowatt hour battery or what did you do? I installed
• 10:21
  Astrid Atkinson: a 40 kilowatt hour battery? Yes. Yeah.
• 10:24
  Tim Montague: Yeah, big battery does solve the problem, but boy, that's a big, that's a big ticket.
• 10:30
  Astrid Atkinson: Well, certainly, and it was expensive.
• 10:33
  Astrid Atkinson: And my neighbors can't afford that. And like I said, you know, it's a it's a localized but not a systemic solution. The grid provides that systemic solution and that general access to energy as part of the core charter of utilities. So bring it back to the second party.
• 10:46
  Astrid Atkinson: answer to your question.
• 10:49
  Astrid Atkinson: Utilities. Take that and responsibility really seriously, there's a lot of things that, you know, they, they don't do well or could do better. But if you really want to connect to the kind of coordination that lies at the heart of pretty much any utility, talk to them about the universality of access to power, and the role that that plays in human civilization and the communities that they serve, they take that super seriously.
• 11:13
  Astrid Atkinson: And they are the custodians of that role, making sure that everybody gets access to power, and that in theory, it is universal and fair. In practice, always, you know, there's a lot of devils in the details, that that is a core mission that they hold. When they think about their job, they also think about the job of keeping the lights on. And up until pretty recently, I think that getting solar power onto the grid was kind of ancillary for them to have that role. And in a very significant way, right, like, not not part of the day to day challenge of keeping the lights on restoring power, after storms, those kinds of things.
• 11:48
  Astrid Atkinson: That's changing really rapidly.
• 11:53
  Astrid Atkinson: Now, you know, as my house bears witness, the old connectivity model is not necessarily working as well as it used to smarter utilities are also looking to the future and kind of asking themselves, okay, how do we serve that 3x demand load. And the moment that being able to manage that load flexibility and getting those localized energy sources on the grid becomes core to the mission of keeping the lights on, you're now in the territory of core capabilities for utilities and the things that they really care about the most. I also have a background in operations, I understand that you're an operator, and your job is to get paged at 3am, or to be sitting there in an operating center at 3am. Trying to keep power running or services running in the middle of adverse conditions. So you're not always super excited about people showing up with new technologies to be like, Hey, I built it, can you put it on your grid. But when it helps you solve that problem that changes things really quickly. So that's a big part of the work that we do is to give utilities the tools that would help them to treat the additions to their grid as a core part of their reliability mission, and to be able to support them in that goal of being able to provide universal low cost and fair and reliable access to power to their customers. Like I said, you know, that's, that's really just it's core to how they think about their work and what they do. So
• 13:18
  Tim Montague: give us an example of how that works. How does software, help utilities integrate dtrs into their day to day mission? Yeah, so
• 13:28
  Astrid Atkinson: I think one of the interesting areas for a lot of utilities is the addition of EVs to the grid. You know, this is a it's a little bit it feels it feels like a kind of an old, an old hat item at this point, because we've been talking about EVs for so long. But we are finally at the point where it actually matters where the rate of Evie adoption is becoming noticeable. And while I think all of us were interested in figuring out, you know, how do you get them onto the grid? How do you get them to be providing grid services? How do you help people to electrify and encourage them to buy EVs and all of those kinds of things?
• 14:06
  Astrid Atkinson: How do you get utilities excited about supporting them? It was kind of academic until very recently, there's a couple of utilities that we work with, who have been trying to proactively understand what the role of EVs on the grid is really going to mean for them. And I think one thing that's super important to understand about low growth is that it isn't really easy to capture the impact of low growth and like overall percentages, right? Like, if you look at the IEA reports, we're still at like, 2% year over year, and that's not very much US government reports. Likewise, if you just look at overall growth, still not very high. But if you actually talk to utilities about what they're seeing, it varies a lot by territory. You know, some of them are seeing a couple percent load gross, some of them, you know, one that I talked to you recently is expecting 17% by 2028, year over year, which is huge. And then within their territories, pretty much all of them at this point, have areas where there's a lot of growth, that's really like a cause for concern, whether that's factories going in or data centers are a big driver of load growth. But they're also sort of looking at EVs and thinking, well, that's the one source of load that I can't really, you know, it doesn't show up on an interconnection request, how is that gonna impact my grid. And if you actually model that on a feeder by feeder, like a circuit by circuit or substation by substation basis, taking a baseline from the EVS that are actually out there today that serves to produce a really vivid picture of what the future could look like. We start with a baseline of maybe, you know, two or 5% of vehicles that are out there today on the highest load substations, and then you play that forward at a 10 or 20%.
• 15:46
  Astrid Atkinson: growth rate year over year.
• 15:46
  Astrid Atkinson: Doesn't matter much this year.
• 15:50
  Astrid Atkinson: Doesn't matter much Check next year, but it's an exponential growth rate. And by about 2026 2728, suddenly you're looking at building new substations. And that's really soon by utility. You know, from a utility perspective, we
• 16:07
  Tim Montague: can't we just say, like, understanding where the huge future by looking at Northern Europe because they're much further along in the energy transition. They're electrifying HVAC with heat pumps. And they're buying way, way more EVs we're at, we're only at 5%. Here in the US, it's a good watermark. But there are places in Northern Europe where they're at 80 plus percent. It's
• 16:30
  Astrid Atkinson: kind of academic to most American utilities, I think when they look at that, and they think like, oh, I don't know, I don't even know how many of us are out there today. But like, one of the things that we help our utilities to is analyze their major data patterns to understand where Evie charging is happening right now, once you have the base load, you play that forward, that becomes really personal in a hurry. This is not like oh, in Europe, we're having to build someone's building new substations for evey load. This is on my grid in three years, I'm going to need many more than I planned for and that's going to be really expensive. And now that's the most important thing I'm doing in my job.
• 17:09
  Tim Montague: But so is the IS is your platform. Something that that is going to that if I'm a utility. Today, I don't have camo tomorrow, I have camo and I go, Oh, no big deal. The grid is completely changing. Loads are going through the roof, because of electrification of HVAC, and industry and transportation.
• 17:36
  Tim Montague: Yeah, like, how does that how does that work? Yeah,
• 17:40
  Astrid Atkinson: so we've we give two parts to what we do.
• 17:42
  Astrid Atkinson: The first piece is data integration. So we work with the utility to integrate data across our operational landscape, but also from their customer devices and program enrolled devices. So most utilities today have a pretty good handle on what's happening on their grid to the sort of substation level separately, they have a pretty good view at the meter level, but it typically trails by like six to 24 hours. Some have the ability to put that together, but not most. And very few have the ability to incorporate any information about what's happening at the meter, or behind the meter into their core operational systems. So there's that big gap between the grid as the utility sees it from like, their operations center, which goes, you know, like I said, to the substation, maybe the recloser, versus what's really happening out there on the edges of the grid, being able to incorporate information, firstly, about you know, what's really happening with those Eevee locations, whether that's by connecting directly to the EVS and getting information from them, or modeling it, we do a mix. Firstly, understanding all of that information in context, and what that's going to mean, is helping to fill the gap that most utilities have. Secondly, being able to connect that to what you want all of those resources to do, from you know, large scale solar, front of meter storage, all those things, to customer EVs, customer batteries, those kinds of things, basically, kind of being the brains the operation. What do you want all those resources to do in order to make most efficient use of the network that you have? That's the orchestration part. So how could you use a substation battery to offset the peak load generated by EB charging, utility can control the substation battery, they might be able to control the peak, the charging times are the TV directly or indirectly, understanding firstly, what's going to make a difference, and then being able to actually get those messages to those TVs as batteries, etc. We do both parts. We do both the data and the understanding and then also the control. And
• 19:41
  Tim Montague: so it's helping utilities plan for the future, but also in real time manage the assets that they have, you know, and, you know, leveraging virtual power plants, for example. I mean, that's right.
• 20:45
  Tim Montague: Sunrun is a force now, right?
• 20:48
  Tim Montague: They're installing a gigawatt of solar a year. And their attachment rate is has gone through the roof. Because of NIMH 3.0. In California. I mean, I would imagine you're working in the California market, or how many markets are you working in?
• 21:03
  Tim Montague: And are you able to work in
• 21:06
  Astrid Atkinson: so today we're doing some work in California, some in the kind of Rocky Mountain West region and then some on the east coast. So Pennsylvania and Vermont. So today where US based, but it really is kind of all across the country. And it's a range from utilities that are really seeing a lot of solar and local resource adoption to ones that aren't yet seeing that but really want to take a leadership role and what that's going to mean for their communities as that comes online.
• 21:36
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• 22:13
  Tim Montague: Okay. So if I'm a if I'm a utility, and I, you know, I've got this established business model, I'm a regulated monopoly monopoly. And that's true, whether you're an IOU or, or a public power utility, there's not that, from my experience, they're not all that different.
• 22:37
  Tim Montague: They are different. There are subtle differences. And it's very strange how jurors how regional it is like in Wisconsin, the the, the communities and coops are embracing solar energy in Illinois, they're not at all, they're pushing back. And it's only an IOU territory that solar is happening is so if I'm utility, though, and, you know, I look out at this landscape of, of tools, so to speak, why am I incentivized to embrace the future, so to speak? Because, you know, that's one of the real problems that renewable energy professionals see today is that they're not that incentivized there, they have this business model of, we want to build transmission and distribution on a cost cost plus model. And, and we don't, we don't really care about the energy transition. We care about uptime for the grid.
• 23:48
  Tim Montague: And, and, you know, when when we don't provide that society, you know, says, Look, you're in trouble. And then, and then the utility goes, well, we're gonna bankrupt. Yeah, sorry, guys, we we caused a bunch of fires. And the grid went down. But yeah, I guess back to my question, if I'm a utility, what is it? What is my primary motivation to talk to you at camo? And what is your experience? I guess? Like, do you have some secret door opening sauce?
• 24:26
  Astrid Atkinson: So I think that question about motivation is really the right one, because that's really what it gets down to, right. Like you never are going to sell a technology solution or a system solution to a customer that doesn't feel like it's fundamentally important to them and solves a core problem to their business.
• 24:42
  Astrid Atkinson: There's sort of no point. But it varies a lot depending on utility. And I think that's something what you're seeing, you know, region by region and case by case for some of the local coops and munis, they have energy contracts structures that do allow them to make money from local energy resources. So a lot of coops in Munis are bound to long term power procurement contracts with large providers like generation and transmission providers that don't allow them to buy power outside of that contract. So if they're in a 40 year g&t, all requirements contract, typically a co ops not allowed to buy more than 5% of its power outside of that contract. And that includes rooftop solar. So their ability to let's say, go build solar in their territory, and then get, you know, solar at three cents a kilowatt instead of 10. Through their generation transmission provider contract, the financial proposition may be attractive, but their ability to take advantage of it is really limited. So some of them have broken their contracts. And they can do things differently. Some of them already have partial requirements, contracts and have the option to vary that the nonprofit Co Op, and municipal utilities do typically care about cost of energy because they serve smaller communities, when the cost of energy goes up, their customers bills go up. And then people yell at them in Walmart. And they don't like that, or they get voted out at the City Council or they get voted out of the co op board.
• 26:19
  Astrid Atkinson: The Co Op board will eventually replace the CEO if rates go up too much. So they're pretty motivated to keep rates low.
• 26:26
  Astrid Atkinson: They also likewise don't really like to build more physical infrastructure because that also drives rates up and that cuts into part of their core mission.
• 26:31
  Astrid Atkinson: They might be motivated to adopt clean energy or to transition to renewables for mission reasons if their community is really pushing on it. But if it's cheaper They'll 100% Do it right away if they have the ability.
• 26:45
  Astrid Atkinson: The other thing is, if they have energy, contract structures were reducing their customer usage during certain peak Windows reduce reduces their energy bills. And for some of them, that can be a really big deal, it saves them millions of dollars a year, then they actually get really interested in customer load management technologies. So they love demand response, they love VPPs, if they can make or save money on them. So that for that sector, that's a pretty big buying motivation for some of them. And it's really just to kind of save money for their customers. For investor owned utilities, that's not so much the case. Like, for most of them, energy costs is a strict pass through to their customers, it's not part of their profit model. And they do have a profit model. So they're, you know, they're looking to make money on behalf of their shareholders.
• 27:29
  Astrid Atkinson: And in that profit model, they're typically looking at that regulated rate of return on building more infrastructure. So if they get to build a new substation, typically, you know, then they make 8%, on the cost of that, that's part of how they make they make money. And that's, that is, that is definitely a goal for them. So in theory, they should be really excited about load growth, because there's more infrastructure to be built, more profit to be made. But that's been largely theoretical, until recently, for many, many years, every year, they were like, oh, in five years, there's going to be so much growth. And then there never was, it was maybe a year, maybe a percent of load growth year over year, or even a drop, because people were, you know, actually, the biggest difference for most utilities was to transition to LED light bulbs. It made such a big difference, and overall demand levels that it really ate into all of the load growth, that would have driven up their profits from building more infrastructure for a very long time. That's changing, but it's only just starting to change.
• 28:34
  Astrid Atkinson: The smart ones are really excited about EVs, because it means that they get to get to build infrastructure, they get to make money, a lot more of that business that used to go through gas stations is going to go through them. A lot of the profit, ultimately for the fossil fuel industry, should be something that utilities get to share in. But that's been really academic up until now. But it's also kind of scary for them.
• 28:58
  Astrid Atkinson: Because that might mean instead of building a few line upgrades and a substation upgrade year over year, now they might be looking at building 20, that's really expensive, it's 10 times the work, it's 10 times the cost might not probably wasn't in the plan. And so there's a bit of an opportunity for them. But it's also really scary. And they don't really have the tools to think about, how would you deal with growth that that's that is that rapid? And manage the costs associated associated with it and all of those things. So when you engage with utilities who are thinking about that, they are very, very, very motivated to understand, like, where soccer is happening? How can I manage it? How can I manage the cost associated with it? Because yeah, I'm excited about building new infrastructure. But I can't literally build infrastructure quickly enough to account for all that load growth in the next five years, if it's going to show up in the next five years.
• 29:48
  Astrid Atkinson: And so that's why working with someone like us becomes really important because it's like, okay, it's going to cost like, I don't know, a billion dollars to upgrade all my substations over the next like seven to 10 years for EVs. That's something that my regulator is going to be really concerned about, I need to prove to them that I'm taking all of the steps to lower those costs to make my greatest efficient as possible. Suddenly, efficiency matters a lot where it didn't really matter to them before because they weren't really concerned about keeping the load down. So that's kind of the context that we work with utilities within. And it's really in that context of like that, that transition to full electrification is where what we do suddenly starts to matter a lot.
• 30:33
  Tim Montague: Yeah. I appreciate this kind of soup to nuts approach you're seemingly taken.
• 30:40
  Tim Montague: Taking your your servicing costs from unis, g&t, providers, investor owned utilities. If if I was to go to your website and read the white papers there, you know, what, what am I going to learn? I guess, what is the aha moment? For me, if I'm one of those three, or all three of those, right? Like, I'm looking for? We need a breakthrough, right? We don't need incremental change, we need radical change.
• 31:20
  Tim Montague: And, and, and while you know, distributed generation is still a small part of the grid, eventually, you know, by 2050 It's going to be a major part of the grid. And I'm just curious like how you see the evolution of the grid happening? Because you know, frankly, you you are involved in in that visioning process, you are ultimately going to become the grease or some of the grease for the, for the skids of the evolution of the industry.
• 31:56
  Astrid Atkinson: Yeah, I think this is a really exciting time to be working in the grid, it is a very profound change that were discussing. And that's kind of intimidating. But on the other hand, for me personally, like, I was really fortunate to be part of a fundamentally transformational change in the computing industry. We went from a model in which you were kind of fundamentally limited and what sorts of problems you could solve in a computing space by how much work a single computer could do, to one where the kinds of problems that you can solve are fundamentally unlimited. And that was the transition, you know, originally, that made things like Google Search possible, being able to bring back the best sources of information about any particular thing from the vast billions of documents out there on the internet, in under a second is actually pretty. It's really difficult to do from a technology perspective, it was a fundamental transformation and computing, something that we really take for granted. Now, you know, I've got, I got my phone here. And if I want to know how to fight if I want to know how to open the trunk of my rental car at one in the morning, after my flight Scotland in light, and I can't figure out how to get my suitcase in the back, I can ask that question of my phone, it will be able to give me a video that shows me where the trunk releases. in under a second.
• 33:24
  Astrid Atkinson: That's people have forgotten, I think what a big change that was in the computing space. Even 10 years ago, when my son was a baby, when I wanted to talk to my mom, I called her on the talking phone. And then six months later, when I wanted to talk to my mom, I picked up my phone, and I could do a video call with her. I was actually on the team that helped to build that infrastructure. I worked on a lot of stuff at Google. But that was like, such a big change. You know, suddenly we went from like, I'm talking on the phone on the receiver to this Star Trek world where I'm walking in the park with my baby talking into my like little portal, the computing power that made that possible is a was a breaking change in the industry.
• 34:07
  Astrid Atkinson: It fundamentally changed how we use that network, what the network consists of how it's built, how its topology works, what people do with it. And we need that change for the grid as well. And the details of you know, how you transition a network to be fundamentally distributed to do 10, or 1000 times the work. I think we're all sort of kind of boringly small. But that's also kind of the good news, right, like we've solved problems around how you get networks to do more work a couple of times over between the internet between telephony, we can do it for the grid, one of the things that I'll point to is that in kind of managing that transition process, and I did a lot of work on the operations side, as well as the kind of systems infrastructure side and making this possible for Google.
• 34:58
  Astrid Atkinson: Just the power of being able to see what's going on is pretty profound, most utilities can't see what's happening. And that's part of the reason they're conservative about making changes to the grid. On the transmission side, visibility is pretty good. On the distribution side, it's terrible. Like I mentioned, like, you know, most utilities have invested in smart meters, that gets them up to what happened yesterday, may be six hours ago at best. But that's not the kind of visibility that you would need to get like a minute to minute dynamic grid, where like, could actually take advantage of my batteries to maybe service my neighbors or a substation battery to offset the charging for my Tesla, or, you know, the 20, Tesla's actually, there's not 20, Tesla's in my neighborhood, that's just mine.
• 35:42
  Astrid Atkinson: But like, you get the idea. So in order to move to that real time operations model, you need really good visibility, and you need it without having to re instrument everything. So that's a place where software technology can be really helpful. Firstly, you gotta You need big data, you need to be able to use the cloud. And the utilities don't mostly today, although that's changing, you need all the data, you need to make sense of it in real time, you need to be able to look back over years and look at trends.
• 36:08
  Astrid Atkinson: You need to never throw it away.
• 36:11
  Astrid Atkinson: And that's not what utilities do today. You need that technology that we've already developed.
• 36:15
  Astrid Atkinson: And you need to be able to fill the gaps. So bringing, being able to bring like machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to bridge the gap between the data that we have and the visibility that we need. It's actually pretty transformational. So if you're going to kind of point to anything is sort of a an aha moment, like what really makes a difference, being able to use those technology approaches that we built for the Googles and the Facebook's and the Ubers to be able to see what's happening on A grant so that you can make sense of it, that's, that's going to make a big difference, it's going to make a bigger difference than people expect.
• 36:50
  Tim Montague: So I think we should just wrap up with some, some, some one or two concrete examples of the difference that you're making, you know, for utilities, and you can pick a market I, you know, is it California or somewhere else where the light bulbs are going off for your customers?
• 37:13
  Astrid Atkinson: Yeah, I mean, I think a really interesting market is in the Rocky Mountain West region, where there's kind of a interesting intersection between investment in renewables and interest in local and distributed generation, the strong streak of independence in the West, versus, you know, some of those tensions around energy costs, transition cost, load growth, those kinds of things. A lot of those communities are seeing like Earth or seeing opportunity kind of come into their territories in the form of new factories being built, you know, charging stations for fleet charging, and you know, cross country travel, those kinds of things, data centers.
• 37:55
  Astrid Atkinson: And just they're, you know, customer customers adopting renewable energy and smart grid technologies and smart load technologies, like heat pumps and stuff like that. So there's this nice intersection between like a lot of renewables, on the one hand, a lot of load growth, and then a lot of new technology that we can use to manage that load. So you know, there are multiple utilities in that region that have very aggressive decarbonization, goals, you know, looking to decarbonize by 2030, those are typically the nearest term goals in the country, I have a couple of current customers with those with targets in that range. One of our current customers has already transitioned more than 100% of their daytime energy to local solar, built within their territory connected to their distribution grid, and they're starting to look at selling that to their neighbors, which I think is really cool. For them, that becomes an industry in a source of revenue, ultimately, one that could potentially be really transformative for communities with a lot of sun and not a lot of other local resources. You know, on the flip side of that, those utilities that are looking at supporting really dramatic load growth from like, you know, development, factories, data centers, those kinds of things, they really need tools to manage that cost and manage that reliably.
• 39:10
  Astrid Atkinson: They're looking at putting in substation batteries in the future to manage that. But they're already managing VPs of customer battery, to help them manage energy costs today and keep the costs low for all of their customers. And so those abilities to manage cost at the system level. And really like put the put one customer in one customer's Evie and their battery to work for the benefit of everybody that's happening today, with those local and regional utilities in Colorado in Vermont, they're setting a great example for what that's going to look like for everybody. So I definitely encourage people to look at the examples of those regional utilities to see what could this look like at scale, because putting those VPPs to work to support the grid, and to keep costs low for our customers. So that's not not an imaginary technology. You know, it's happening in Europe as well.
• 40:02
  Astrid Atkinson: That's stuff that's that's really already starting to be demonstrated in the field in a number of places. I also think Australia is really good demonstration. For us. Those those regional utilities in Colorado, in Vermont, and seem to be other places in the US are the places where we're having the most benefit today. But that model of what a next generation utility that's operating their grid in real time in a localized way. We're helping that happen today. And a lot of people are making that work today.
• 40:38
  Tim Montague: Well, we have to stop there. I want to thank you for this interview. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Please tell your friends about the show. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners and connecting with new people. And you can also contact us through the website cleanpowerhour.com.
• 40:58
  Tim Montague: Astrid, how can our listeners
• 41:04
  Astrid Atkinson: Well, we're on the web at camus.energy C A M U find you?
• 41:06
  Astrid Atkinson: S dot energy. Or you can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, kind of all the usual places. Because it's not Twitter anymore.
• 41:21
  Tim Montague: We're just now wonderful Astrid Atkinson, CEO and founder of Camus Energy.
• 41:24
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much.
• 41:27
  Astrid Atkinson: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
• 41:29
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague.
• 41:29
  Tim Montague: Let's go solar and storage. Hey, listeners. This is Tim. I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you. Twice a week. Thank you for being here.
• 41:42
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• 42:09
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• 42:26
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• 42:56
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• 43:02
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• 43:41
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