Register and get 30% off standard registration with our DISCOUNT CODE: ELS-energypriorities30

Mark has dedicated his 30-year career to working with utility and Fortune 1000 customers to deliver value, success and profitable growth. He has deep experience in sales, product marketing, go-to-market strategy and profitable general management of ongoing business operations.

Clearly communicate the value of your clean energy technology innovation. Talk to P5 Group today.

As Itron’s senior vice president of Customer and Market Experience, Mark is responsible for leading Itron’s sales, marketing, channel management, business development, customer support and customer success activities across the full company portfolio. Prior to joining Itron, Mark oversaw consulting, support, hosting and account management at Silicon Energy.

The #energyleadershipsummit2020 will have two keynote speakers.

Paula R. Glover, President and CEO of American Association of Blacks in Energy, will open the virtual conference.

The American Association of Blacks in Energy is a national energy trade association that represents all sectors of the energy industry. Paula leads a 2000-member association with 40 chapters nationwide. The association’s focus is to represent the voice for African Americans and other minorities on energy policy, regulations, and environmental issues.

Paula directs the association’s strategic plan, business development and policy positions. She represents the organization before energy industry executives and national and state policy makers. She is an industry thought leader for issues around diversity and inclusion. Her work on international energy issues underscores the importance of energy to improve the quality of life for people throughout the African Continent.

The association under Paula’s leadership has partnered with the US Department of Energy on its Minorities in Energy initiative as well as business development programming for minority entrepreneurs. She has also testified before Congress about the impact of policies on underserved communities.

Paula has more than 25 years of experience in the energy industry, including 15 years in both electric and natural gas distribution companies where she has worked in government affairs, regulatory affairs and economic development. In March 2014 Paula was appointed to the National Petroleum Council by U.S. Secretary of Energy, Dr. Ernest Moniz. She continues to serve on the Council having been reappointed by Secretary Perry in 2016 and Secretary Brouillette in 2020.

The summit agenda will continue with a featured plenary session where regional experts will debate “Re-Envisioning  the Grid for Deep Decarbonization” followed by three breakout tracks.

Our session picks:

Track A: Zero Net Energy: Scaling Solutions, featuring Haley Gardner, International Living Future Institute, and Lawrence Tsang, Convergent Energy + Power. The market potential is exciting.

Track B: The Equity Imperative: Advancing Environmental Justice in the Clean Energy Economy. This issue is no longer on the fringes.

Track C: Energy Storage: Connecting Renewable Supply and Resilient Demand.

Register here for the event, which will be held online November 12, 2020. Get 30% off standard registration with our DISCOUNT CODE: ELS-energypriorities30

Join your peers on November 19, 2019 at the Washington State Conference Center in Seattle to explore the nexus of energy, climate change, and the region’s economy with more than 400 industry leaders and policymakers from across the Northwest.

There’s plenty of room in the exhibit hall, so sharpen your B2B marketing messages and reserve your space. This event attracts the C-level energy executives and utility managers you’re looking for.

Presented jointly by the CleanTech Alliance and the Northwest Environmental Business Council, this unique event connects policy with practice and addresses the industry’s current challenges and future opportunities.

Register before November 1, 2019 to take advantage of early bird registration rates. Click here for more information.

Computers keep getting smaller and cheaper. Everything in our lives is becoming smart and connected. We are just scratching the surface of how technology will change our lives in the next 10 to 15 years, Steve Brown told an audience of energy utility representatives.

Mr. Brown is a futurist who helps large companies and industry organizations understand trends so they can plan for where the world is going. He gave a keynote address at the 2018 Efficiency Exchange conference hosted by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance and Bonneville Power Administration.

Six technologies will shape the near future for every industry, including energy utilities, Mr. Brown said, and “each technology is about building more bridges between the physical world that we inhabit and the digital world where technology is constantly advancing.”

The big six technologies of the future

In his 15 years at Intel, Steve Brown, an engineer by training, worked at the forefront of digital computing, so he knows about technology. He also worked for a cultural anthropologist at Intel, so he understands how people think about and react to change. And he worked on early Energy Star standards for PCs.

Artificial intelligence tops his list of the big six technologies of the future.

“Artificial intelligence is a big, big deal,” Mr. Brown said. “AI is a completely different type of computing than the digital computing we use today. You program AI computers by training them and showing them data.” AI enables the digital world to learn and imagine.

I caught up with Mr. Brown after his talk and asked him how he would prioritize these six technologies. Is there one we should be paying the most attention to? “If I had to pick just one, it would be AI,” he told me. “If we thought the last 40 years was amazing, in the next 10 years we are likely to see more change in our lives than in the last 40 because of AI’s capabilities. The energy industry should be paying attention to it.”

“You can think of AI as the second coming of computing,” he said in his keynote address, “one that is able to solve a completely different kind of problems.” Self-driving cars would not be possible without AI.

The internet of things is giving the world a nervous system by implanting sensors everywhere. You’re already carrying 8 or 9 sensor that are built into the phone in your pocket. Mr. Brown said there will be around 100 trillion sensors in the world by 2030, telling digital systems what’s happening in their and our physical environment.

“With IoT we can create control loops, where we sense something in the physical world and use that to make a decision and act on it in the digital world,” Mr. Brown told me later. “If we can use AI and sensors to look for patterns in the way people use energy, we have more of an ability to optimize the usage of that energy.”

He said several companies are starting to use AI to look for patterns in people’s usage of energy and coach consumers on how to use less. One IoT example in his presentation was a wallet that becomes harder to open when the owner’s bank balance is low.

In an audience of 400 energy efficiency experts, I wasn’t the only one wondering how we could make a switch harder to turn on when electricity is more expensive.

Autonomous machines are AI inside of robots. Mainstream robots today can’t understand much about the world around them, but with AI they will be able to safely interact with humans in more meaningful ways. Autonomous machines enable the digital world to act.

Blockchain is the technology underlying crypto currencies. “I prefer to think of blockchain as a new platform upon which people will create incredible new value,” Mr. Brown said, “and crypto currency is one of the tricks that make blockchain work.”

Mr. Brown described blockchain as a fancy database, distributed across many computers, with no central owner, and all the data is stored with military-grade encryption. “Blockchain allows us to create decentralized applications, like a social media platform without one central company in control of it.”

Blockchain also enables distributed open-source development of applications as well as shared ownership in small portions of projects. Think community solar, with many owners of small shares coming together to make the project a reality.

If you’re tired of your mobile phone’s slow and intermittent internet connection, hang on, Mr. Brown said, 5G is coming. “The Internet of things will need a constant connection and low latency,” he said. “5G networks don’t just make data go faster, they make connections more reliable.”

One technology that will need 5G’s always-on broadband is augmented reality.

“Augmented reality takes digital content and overlays it on the physical world,” Mr. Brown said. “Essentially the world becomes your display.” He showed a short video illustrating some of the many possibilities for augmented reality, which goes far beyond virtual reality in its capabilities.

How the big six technologies combine to shape the future

Mr. Brown gave some examples of how these six technologies will come together to change the world we live in a decade or more from now.

“Cobots” are robots that will work alongside humans. These AI coworkers will be able to train people on the job, perform quality assurance in manufacturing, and alert equipment owners to upcoming maintenance needs.

AI-enabled autonomous cars will become a shared resource. “We are about to make a major leap in transportation,” Mr. Brown said. We won’t need nearly as many cars, but they will all be electric. Makers and nations are committed to zero emissions vehicles. Uber is experimenting with air taxis.

“Things are going to flip quite quickly, and that’s going to mean people want a lot more electricity.” Electric vehicles and blockchain, among other upcoming technologies, consume enormous amounts of energy. But these trends portend some good news for renewables: more storage.

Electric cars are a giant battery, Mr. Brown said. “Utilities could get into the car fleet business. Why let Uber do that? EVs could become grid level storage.”

What about all that privacy and cybersecurity stuff?

I asked Mr. Brown about privacy and security, given the challenges we already have without these new technologies, and the risk aversion of utilities.

“Privacy matters, and security matters more,” he told me. “People are willing to give up privacy so that companies can gather the data they need to better serve their customers. Make it opt in. Promise security. Explain the benefits and be transparent.”

In his keynote speech, Mr. Brown said that regulation is one tool for keeping up with these technological advances – and keeping them out of manipulative hands – “but fundamentally we need to have a cultural conversation about how we embrace technology,” he told the audience.

“I deputize you as deputy futurists to go have this conversation about the world we want to build and the world we want to avoid. Conversation before regulation.”

“You have a very bright future,” Mr. Brown said in closing. “Your customers are going to go through rapid changes, and so are you.”

https://art19.com/shows/the-energy-gang/episodes/5193958f-63ec-4f0e-85d8-f8e7ab0807ad/embed?theme=dark-blue
This installment of “The Energy Gang” podcast dives into the pros and cons of new solar import barriers that took effect February 7, 2018. Sudden 30 percent tariffs are indeed spurring talk of new onshore solar module assembly plants, says guest Julia Pyper.

There’s a hitch: The plans that solar manufacturers are discussing would not represent enough capacity to meet the volume needs of a growing solar industry in the United States. Installers and developers are at risk of losing jobs because of capacity constraints. Some manufacturers had signed multiyear deals before the quota was imposed — so U.S. jobs could already be on the chopping block.

New manufacturing would make up for the job losses, right? Not even close. Module manufacturing is highly automated. Any plausible number of new U.S. plants are not likely to employ thousands. And when the economics change, those plants can close as easily as they opened. Tariffs intended to encumber solar exporters for the next four years are likely to harm America first.

“The Energy Gang” is an informal industry-insider podcast for green energy business listeners. Co-hosts Katherine Hamilton (Partner at 38 North Solutions) and Jigar Shah (founder of SunEdison), led by Greentech Media Editor in Chief Stephen Lacey, jump on a conference call every week to spar about the headlines. They share their deep industry knowledge and engage in lively discussions about the technologies, policies and market forces shaping a global energy transformation.

This anthology of energy podcasts would not be complete without this show. Stephen Lacey and I started podcasting about energy wa-a-ay before most people knew what a podcast was. We became friends while he was a reporter-producer at Renewable Energy World and I had just started Energy Priorities. We’ve supported each other’s podcast work, appeared on each other’s shows and collaborated on web pieces together.

Please share your thoughts with us and your colleagues by posting this on your favorite social media network. We’ve provided sharing buttons to make it easy. Mention @TheEnergyGang and @Cleantech. You can also send comments to me by email.

The way energy efficiency incentives programs work almost everywhere in the United States, the utility takes all the risk. That’s because the customer gets the incentive payment up front, whether or not any energy is actually saved by the energy efficiency measures the utility paid for.

Pay-for-Performance programs are an emerging utility incentive model. Conceived in Seattle, Pay-For-Performance programs are different, including the way savings and incentive payments are expected to drive initial investments, and the emphasis on ongoing operations and maintenance.

P4P spreads risk by not paying all the incentives up front, instead measuring actual savings and making monthly or annual payments to the participating customer. Bigger savings, bigger check.

The greatest risk of Pay-For-Performance programs lay in the unknowns: it had seldom been tried. So Seattle authorized Seattle City Light to run a very limited commercial building pilot of Pay-For-Performance in 2012, the first of its kind in the country. The three-building pilot program ran from 2013 to 2016.

Today the three local utilities – Puget Sound Energy, Seattle City Light, and Snohomish PUD – are implementing performance-based incentives with varying degrees of caution. Several other utilities around the country are now experimenting with them in commercial buildings, and PG&E is piloting a residential program.

DURING THE SEATTLE PILOT, Stan Price was the executive director of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Council, which advocated for Pay-for-Performance. He believes P4P is the best next move for utility-incentivized energy efficiency in the commercial building sector.

“The deemed-savings method worked for 30 years of energy efficiency incentives. But now we have more data,” says Mr. Price. “We know more about how buildings work.”

Building energy models are sophisticated now, making the performance method possible by providing a baseline for normalized metered energy consumption and savings.

Black-and-white savings calculations make utilities more comfortable, but customer acceptance has more to do with their gray matter.

“We spent years trying to convince customers that energy savings are opex savings and affect the bottom line just like top-line revenue,” says Mr. Price. “P4P translates the savings into an annualized revenue stream, so finance people finally get it” – and, he hopes, will be more motivated to participate.

The flexibility of performance-based incentives should be another factor in persuading building owners to participate. Instead of picking from a list of approved measures, participants can find creative ways to eliminate energy waste.

THAT DOESN’T MEAN P4P programs are “measure blind.” Yes, spreading the risk means utilities can be more agnostic about how energy is saved, but not completely.

For one thing, measures with a predictably long life are worth more to a utility than savings that might fade quickly after the last rebate check, says Joseph Fernandi of Seattle City Light.

City Light and PSE both require a 15% immediate energy reduction as a way to force capital expenditures into the P4P measure mix. Otherwise, efficiency measures based purely on behavior change, or operations and maintenance, take longer to ramp up and don’t have the reliable persistence of capex investments.

“It’s about how we marble these things together,” says Mr. Price, “because with P4P we’re taking a whole building approach, a holistic view.”

Even though specifics shouldn’t matter, Snohomish PUD wants to know what’s being implemented. Jessica Mitchell of SnoPUD explains that it has to do with the financing mechanism. The annualized incentive payments are a bankable revenue stream. Should the utility cancel the contract, there needs to be a final payment – and to calculate that payment, the utility needs to know the measures so they can value them.

At this early stage of pay-for-performance programs, learning from the measure mix is important to utilities. Mr. Fernandi of Seattle City Light says that assumptions about the measure mix and their durability inform the incentive dollar amounts the utility establishes for performance-based programs.

HOW MUCH SAVINGS are we talking about? Seattle City Light hopes to see 40 percent energy savings over the life of a P4P program based on results from the pilot program.

That’s not as aggressive as it sounds, Mr. Price says. “The buildings that participated in Seattle’s pilot were already well performing buildings, so it’s possible we’ve been undercounting the viability of the resource.”

Stan Price has high expectations not only for the savings, but for the positive changes that Pay-for-Performance can bring to utility-run energy efficiency programs.

“Deemed savings overemphasizes the easy savings to meet annual efficiency goals,” Mr. Price says, referring to that model as “energy efficiency 1.0.”

“I hope a matured Pay-for-Performance model will blow that up, replacing it with energy efficiency 2.0, and change how we think about energy efficiency incentives.”

Stan Price, Jessica Mitchell and Joe Fernandi, together with PSE’s Corey Corbett, spoke on a panel at Washington’s Energy Future Conference.