electrical grid
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Revel turns to software to keep its e-moped fleet powered without straining NYC’s grid
Revel is turning to an app that gamifies energy use to keep its fleet of more than 3,000 electric mopeds charged without putting a strain on New York City’s power grid.
Electricity is the key ingredient for the Brooklyn-based startup, which has more recently expanded beyond shared electric mopeds and into e-bike subscriptions, fast-charging infrastructure and even an all EV ride-hailing service. It’s not just about accessing power; managing when that power is tapped will be essential for Revel to keep its operational costs as low as possible.
That’s where Logical Buildings comes in. The software company has developed GridRewards, an app that helps customers lower their monthly energy consumption and earn cash rewards in the process. The app’s “virtual power plant” software will help Revel dynamically adjust the charging schedule of its fleet to support NYC’s electrical grid resilience, according to a statement from the companies.
“As we continue to expand our electric mobility products, we plan to be an asset to the grid rather than a liability,” said Paul Suhey, Revel COO & co-founder, in a statement. “Our EV infrastructure and charging operations can play a major role in helping NYC transition to a cleaner electric grid.”
EV adoption and shared micromobility services are on the rise, so many industry players are finding ways to transfer energy between batteries and the grid. EV battery swapping company Ample says its swapping stations can be used to generate backup power in case of an emergency, and even Ford’s new pickup truck, the F-150 Lighting, can power your home in the event of an outage.
In Revel’s case, the company hopes to provide services to the grid like “demand response” operations, where charging stations shed a load when needed in order to provide immediate relief to the grid, something the company just did in NYC. During the heat wave of the week of June 28, the mobility company adjusted its fleet charging schedule to avoid peak demand times.
Revel says avoiding peak demand times also helps to create a cleaner grid because when energy is in high demand, the sources of power generation emit twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity and 20 times as much nitrogen oxides.
Revel also owns a fleet of Teslas for an all-EV ridehailing service that has had to halt its services due to a cap placed on new for-hire vehicles in the city. But at present, the company will only be implementing this technology with its e-mopeds.
“As transportation electrifies, it is imperative that electric mobility companies schedule their charging operations to promote grid resiliency,” said David Klatt, Logical Buildings’ VP of operations, in a statement. “Revel is taking necessary steps to ensure it is a leader in intelligent charging operations, paving the way for the smooth electrification and decarbonization of NYC.”
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Three energy-innovation takeaways from Texas’ deep freeze
Individual solutions to the collective crisis of climate change abound: backup diesel generators, Tesla powerwalls, “prepper” shelters. However, the infrastructure that our modern civilization relies on is interconnected and interdependent — energy, transportation, food, water and waste systems are all vulnerable in climate-driven emergencies. No one solution alone and in isolation will be the salvation to our energy infrastructure crisis.
No one solution alone and in isolation will be the salvation to our energy infrastructure crisis.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the California wildfires last year and the recent deep freeze in Texas, the majority of the American public has not only realized how vulnerable infrastructure is, but also how critical it is to properly regulate it and invest in its resilience.
What is needed now is a mindset shift in how we think about infrastructure. Specifically, how we price risk, how we value maintenance and how we make policy that is aligned with our climate reality. The extreme cold weather in Texas wreaked havoc on electric and gas infrastructure that was not prepared for unusually cold weather events. If we continue to operate without an urgent (bipartisan?) investment in infrastructure, especially as extreme weather becomes the norm, this tragic trend will only continue (with frontline communities bearing a disproportionately high burden).
A month after Texas’ record-breaking storm, attention is rightly focused on helping the millions of residents putting their lives back together. But as we look toward the near-term future and get a better picture of the electric mobility tipping point on the horizon, past-due action to reform our nation’s energy infrastructure and utilities must take precedence.
Emphasize energy storage
Seventy-five percent of Texas’ electricity is generated from fossil fuels and uranium, and about 80% of the power outages in Texas were caused by these systems. The state and the U.S. are overly dependent on outdated energy generation, transmission and distribution technologies. As the price of energy storage is expected to drop to $75/kWh by 2030, more emphasis needs to be placed on “demand-side management” and distributed energy resources that support the grid, rather than trying to supplant it. By pooling and aggregating small-scale clean energy generation sources and customer-sited storage, 2021 can be the year that “virtual power plants” realize their full potential.
Policymakers would do well to mandate new incentives and rebates to support new and emerging distributed energy resources installed on the customers’ side of the utility meter, such as California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program.
Invest in workforce development
For the energy transition to succeed, workforce development will need to be a central component. As we shift from coal, oil and gas to clean energy sources, businesses and governments — from the federal to the city level — should invest in retraining workers into well-paying jobs across emerging verticals, like solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. In energy efficiency (the lowest-hanging fruit of the energy transition), cities should seize the opportunity to tie equity-based workforce development programs to real estate energy benchmarking requirements.
These policies will not only boost the efficiency of our energy systems and the viability of our aging building stock, creating a more productive economy, but will also lead to job growth and expertise in a growth industry of the 21st century. According to analysis from Rewiring America, an aggressive national commitment to decarbonization could yield 25 million good-paying jobs over the next 15 years.
Build microgrids for reliability
Microgrids can connect and disconnect from the grid. By operating on normal “blue-sky” operating days as well as during emergencies, microgrids provide uninterrupted power when the grid goes down — and reduce grid constraints and energy costs when grid-connected. Previously the sole domain of military bases and universities, microgrids are growing 15% annually, reaching an $18 billion market in the U.S. by 2022.
For grid resiliency and reliable power supply, there is no better solution than community-scale microgrids that connect critical infrastructure facilities with nearby residential and commercial loads. Funding feasibility studies and audit-grade designs — so that communities have zero-cost but high-quality pathways to constructable projects, as New York State did with the NY Prize initiative — is a proven way to involve communities in their energy planning and engage the private sector in building low-carbon resilient energy systems.
Unpredictability and complexity are quickening, and technology has its place, but not simply as an individual safeguard or false security blanket. Instead, technology should be used to better calculate risk, increase system resilience, improve infrastructure durability and strengthen the bonds between people in a community both during and in between emergencies.
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Residential renewable energy developer Swell is raising $450 million for distributed power projects in three states
Swell Energy, an installer and manager of residential renewable energy, energy efficiency and storage technologies, is raising $450 million to finance the construction of four virtual power plants representing a massive amount of energy storage capacity paired with solar power generation.
It’s a sign of the distributed nature of renewable energy development and a transition from large-scale power generation projects feeding into utility grids at their edge to smaller, point solutions distributed at the actual points of consumption.
The project will pair 200 megawatt hours of distributed energy storage with 100 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity, the company said.
Los Angeles-based Swell was commissioned by utilities across three states to establish the dispatchable energy storage capacity, which will be made available through the construction and aggregation of approximately 14,000 solar energy generation and storage systems. The goal is to make local grids more efficient.
To finance these projects — and others the company expects to land — Swell has cut a deal with Ares Management Corp. and Aligned Climate Capital to create a virtual power plant financing vehicle with a target of $450 million.
That financing entity will support the development of power projects like the combined solar and battery agreement nationwide.
Over the next 20 years, Swell is targeting the development of over 3,000 gigawatt hours of clean solar energy production, with customers storing 1,000 gigawatt hours for later use, and dispatching 200 gigawatt hours of this stored energy back to the utility grid.
It has the potential to create a more resilient grid less susceptible to the kinds of power outages and rolling blackouts that have plagued states like California.
“Utilities are increasingly looking to distributed energy resources as valuable ‘grid edge’ assets,” said Suleman Khan, CEO of Swell Energy, in a statement. “By networking these individual homes and businesses into virtual power plants, Swell is able to bring down the cost of ownership for its customers and help utilities manage demand across their electric grids,” said Khan. “By receiving GridRevenue from Swell, customers participating in our VPP programs pay less for their solar energy generation and storage systems, while potentially reducing the risk of a local power outage, and keeping their homes and businesses securely powered through any outages.”
Along with the launch of the virtual power plant financing vehicle, Swell is also giving homeowners a way to finance their home energy systems through Swell. They need the buy-in from homeowners to get these power plants off the ground, and for homeowners, there’s a way to get some money back by feeding power into the grid.
It’s a win-win for the company, customers and early investors like Urban.us, which was seed investor in the company.
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Microsoft’s Project Natick underwater data center experiment confirms viability of seafloor data storage
Microsoft has concluded a years-long experiment involving use of a shipping container-sized underwater data center, placed on the sea floor off the cost of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The company pulled its “Project Natick” underwater data warehouse up out of the water earlier this year (at the beginning of the summer) and spent the last few months studying the data center, and the air it contained, to determine the model’s viability.
The results not only showed that using these offshore submerged data centers seems to work well in terms of performance, but also revealed that the servers contained within the data center proved to be up to eight times more reliable than their dry-land counterparts. Researchers will be looking into exactly what was responsible for this greater reliability rate in the hopes of also translating those advantages to land-based server farms for increased performance and efficiency across the board.
Other advantages included being able to operate with greater power efficiency, especially in regions where the grid on land is not considered reliable enough for sustained operation. That’s due in part to the decreased need for artificial cooling for the servers located within the data farm because of the conditions at the sea floor. The Orkney Island area is covered by a 100% renewable grid supplied by both wind and solar, and while variances in the availability of both power sources would’ve proven a challenge for the infrastructure power requirements of a traditional, overland data center in the same region, the grid was more than sufficient for the same size operation underwater.
Microsoft’s Natick experiment was meant to show that portable, flexible data center deployments in coastal areas around the world could prove a modular way to scale up data center needs while keeping energy and operation costs low, all while providing smaller data centers closer to where customers need them, instead of routing everything to centralized hubs. So far, the project seems to have done spectacularly well at showing that. Next, the company will look into seeing how it can scale up the size and performance of these data centers by linking more than one together to combine their capabilities.
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RiskIQ adds National Grid Partners as securing data becomes a strategic priority for utilities
RiskIQ, a startup providing application security, risk assessment and vulnerability management services, has added National Grid Partners as a strategic investor.
The funding from the investment arm of National Grid, a multinational energy provider, is part of a $15 million new round of financing designed to take the company’s technology into critical industrial infrastructure — with National Grid as a point of entry.
More than 6,000 companies use the company’s services, and the roster list and technology on offer has attracted some of the biggest names in investing, including Summit Partners, Battery Ventures, Georgian Partners and MassMutual Ventures.
“We view NGP’s show of support as an incredible opportunity to help customers in new markets thrive as their attack surfaces expand outside the firewall, especially now amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” RiskIQ chief executive Lou Manousos said in a statement.
RiskIQ has spent the past 10 years spidering the internet looking for all of the exploits that hackers use to penetrate networks and have built that into a database of threats. This inventory gives the company an ability to identify which assets within a company present the most obvious threats. Its automated services constantly scan third-party code, internet-connected devices and mobile applications for potential vulnerabilities, the company said.
“As a staple platform in their core security environment, our cyber threat analysts use RiskIQ regularly to enrich and identify incoming threats,” said Lisa Lambert, president of National Grid Partners and chief technology and innovation officer of National Grid, in a statement.
National Grid’s investment is a piece of a deeper partnership that will see NGP providing strategic advice for the security company as it looks to expand its commercial operations among industrial and utility customers.
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Amperon raises $2 million for its predictive software for energy grids
Energy demand has fallen globally. Oil prices are plummeting. Everywhere in the energy world things look fairly grim, but keeping the lights on and electrons moving remains critical to keeping even the hobbled economies of the world humming.
That’s why startups like Amperon, which use data analysis to provide predictive tools for energy retailers and grid operators, are still relevant — and still raising money.
The company raised $2 million in a round that closed in February before the pandemic hit U.S. shores. And the service, according to co-founder Abe Stanway, is still vital.
“We tell them how much electricity their customers are going to use on a short-term and long-term basis,” Stanway said of the company’s service. “When these exogenous shocks and black swan events occur we get much more valuable because you need this machine learning in order to understand how the grid is going to behave.”
The value proposition was clear to investors like Blackhorn Ventures, which led the round, and other backers, including Garuda Ventures, Intelis Capital, Powerhouse Ventures, SK Ventures and V1.VC.
“Amperon builds real-time operational grid intelligence tools via smart meters and AI for utilities, energy retailers, grid operators and institutional traders,” said Emily Kirsch, Powerhouse founder and chief executive. “Amperon’s iterative demand forecasting is able to account for never-before-seen grid volatility resulting from a global pandemic, climate disasters or an increasingly complex grid.”
Amperon is working with four major geographies, including Australia’s two major grid regions and the ERCOT regional transmission organization responsible for Texas, and PJM, which manages the mid-Atlantic’s electricity grid.
Stanway said the new money would be used to expand the company’s reach across more grid operators in the U.S.
While Amperon’s technology is incredibly useful for utilities and grid operators during times of crisis, it can help save money in normal times too. Long-term utility planners typically over-budget their energy needs by 1% every year, which adds up to billions of dollars spent on unnecessary additional generation capacity, according to Amperon.
Lower spending means reduced electricity prices for consumers. Another issue that Amperon says it can help energy providers address is the increasing complexity of grid management. Renewable energy generation adds variability to the grid that utilities and grid operators have yet to effectively manage, the company said.
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