Recently, David J. Leeds (who we had the pleasure of meeting in person earlier this week when he stopped by our offices) took the time to write an article describing what he calls the “soft grid.” The soft grid is that layer of software that sits on top of the infrastructure of the smart grid, an area that he accurately assesses has — and will continue to — capture the attention of VC’s who are accustomed to investing relatively small amounts in software and consumer-oriented internet plays, not big chunks of cash in infrastructure plays.
“The infrastructure hardware of the smart grid is undoubtedly necessary and important,” David writes. “But it’s the intelligent software – ‘The Soft Grid’ – that has the ability to truly revolutionize this market and provide vendors an opportunity to create defendable intellectual property and differentiation.”
Not surprisingly, we agree with him. Greenbox is rooted firmly in the Soft Grid space as David describes it. And while the new-and-improved Smart Grid and HAN-empowered Smart Homes are popular topics for the media, it’s this layer of software — in our case in the form of an interactive consumer energy management portal — that will enable these large-scale technology changes.
It takes more than a Smart Meter to make a smart energy customer and it takes more than a HAN to make a smart home.Smart decisions are made by informed consumers, people with the knowledge and ability to optimize their cost, comfort, convenience while expressing their personal values.
This education, knowledge acquisition, and interaction layer — what web-based self-service software can do so well — is arguably one of the most important parts of the Smart Grid continuum.
It may sound trivial to make one smart customer or home at a time, but imagine what millions of smart homes working interactively with smart utilities (generation, transmission, distribution) can do together! Without the understanding that comes from real-time energy data and a clear picture of usage trends, customers won’t be able to truly take achieve of the energy savings and positive environmental impact that the Smart Grid can make available.
The Greenbox mission is to provide that understanding and control in a cost-effective and easily accessible way — with the technology that’s available today. Because we think there’s no reason to wait for a Smart Grid to start creating smart energy consumers. Maybe that’s what the Soft Grid is all about. We just think it makes sense.
We received a call earlier this year from a producer looking for a home energy management application with an easy-to-read interface and something that would be quick to get up and running. As it turns out, Greenbox fit the bill perfectly. Thus, our television debut was underway.
The show was the Lazy Environmentalist, a Sundance Channel program hosted by Josh Dorfman that offers easy tips for stylish, green living. Greenbox was featured on Episode 6, which aired July 21. The episode involved an energy efficiency overhaul at the home of Dorfman’s brother, a landscaper in Connecticut.
As highlighted in by the program, Greenbox Technology’s web-based solution is the ideal platform for tracking and understanding your home’s energy usage and for comparing that usage over time as you make changes to make your home more efficient or try to conserve energy.
It’s a question that any group of people looking at starting up a company needs to face.
The ‘traditional’ story of the lonely inventor in the basement dreaming up the better mousetrap seems to mostly exist in Disney movies. The list of super-successful start-ups that ended up building completely different things than their original intent is endless, including such notable companies as Paypal, Hotmail, Excite, and Flickr.
That’s why when I had the opportunity to give the keynote at the Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy last month (link: http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/green_home.php) I focused on putting together great teams that can take life at a start-up.
When compared to life in ‘big companies’, the highs are higher, the lows are lower and having a solid team is critical to supporting everyone toward reaching the end goal.
Here at Greenbox, we’ve been fortunate. Apart from having what we believe is one of the very best teams in software development of any kind, very soon after we started the company 3 years ago, the convergence of low cost radio technology, powerful embedded processor technology, the emerging smart grid, and the oncoming energy crisis lead us quickly to residential energy management space.
In our previous lives, when we built Macromedia Flash and the Flash Player, our team had the unique opportunity of putting software on over a billion computers around the world and changing the world wide web in significant ways.
This is our chance to have an equal effect on our planets energy future. We’re excited about that future, and plan on making our children proud.
We were pleased to see the Department of Energy’s announcement this week that it had invested more than $57 million into smart grid development.
But even more interesting was the Smart Grid System report also released by the DOE. (You can download the report here.)
We’ve been fans of Secretary Steven Chu since he was first named to his post late last year. This report shows the kind of smart thinking we expected from his department.
The Smart Grid System report is a real-world look at the state of the smart grid in the U.S., where we’re headed and where we’re going.
The diagram below shows a realistic map of the elements of the AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) interface. Where Greenbox proudly plays is in that top gray box: the consumer portal layer of technology that is integrated with all of the advances utilities are making to their systems and all of the smart technologies making their way to consumers.
In addition, the report highlights “Informed participation by customers” as the number one attribute of the modern grid, something that Greenbox has been championing and enabling from day one.
Finally, the report highlights that a significant challenge for the smart grid is the uncertainty of the path that its development will take over time. That’s an important fact to highlight and one that Greenbox takes into consideration on a daily basis as we continue to develop our solution with an open architecture and an eye toward the evolution of technology.
In closing, here’s one of our favorite quotes from the report: “The challenge of development becomes an issue of providing flexible regulation that leverages desired and developing technology through goal-directed and business-case-supported policy that promotes a positive economic outcome.”
Greenbox founder, Peter Santangeli, headed to Washington DC last week to meet with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and other industry stakeholders at the White House for a leadership meeting on the creation of a set of national standards for the Smart Grid.We considered it an honor to be invited to such an event.
Following the leadership meeting, Peter also attended a two-day workshop on Smart Grid standards sponsored by NIST.
At Greenbox, we think standards are a great way to align the interests a various industry stakeholders. They should help accelerate the development and successful deployment of technology and we hope that all industry stakeholders apply some resources to them.
Like a lot of other folks in this industry, including blog Earth2Tech, we at Greenbox are keeping an eye on Washington where the details of the climate bill proposed by Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey are deep in the sausage factory.
Among the compromises we’re sorry to see is the elimination of a seperate Energy Efficiency Resource Standard, or EERS which as been cut in the current version of the bill. Basically an EERS sets targets for utilities to reduce energy consumption though efficiency programs and demand reduction.
California is among the states with an EERS in place due to state regulation, but I was hoping to see a national standard put in place. Inexpensive programs to boost efficiency can reduce demand consumption by 20%. And the good in that isn’t just cost savings for consumers and more jobs for a growing industry — it’s the collective shrinking of a national carbon footprint.
Still, the current bill is a big step in the right direction. We’ll keep watching.
You may have seen this story in the San Francisco Business Times last month, “Tech startups lose out on fed’s stimulus.” The headline was nothing short of depressing and in the story Lindsay Riddell described the challenges that small startups face when looking at the prospect of getting a piece of the $787 billion fed stimulus. Greenbox was among the companies mentioned, identified as small, smart startups with cool technology but unlikely to provide the jobs hit necessary to qualify for stimulus funding.
Well, less than a month after that article first appeared: We’re happy to report that Greenbox has fielded several requests from utilities and other entities who are applying for stimulus funding and including the Greenbox platform as their customer-facing technology as part of their application.
Greenbox is a great fit for the aims of the stimulus for two big reasons. First we have the technology that utilities need to bring the smart grid to their customers. And second, a core part of our mission is to help build up a growing, job-creating industry around energy efficiency through recommendations via the Greenbox platform.
Will the utilities we’re working with qualify for stimulus based on what they’re submitting? That part remains to be seen. Stay tuned!
This week NPR has been running a series of stories on the smart grid and how it will impact residential households. It was great to see them go a bit deeper into the story and tease out the fact that the smart meter is only a foundational technology and doesn’t itself provide direct consumer value. They pointed out that it’s the applications that are built on top of and leverage this infrastructure are the ones that will deliver the true value to consumers.
Check out this quote:
“But PPL and other utilities that have begun installing the smart meters are finding that you need more than just the meters to help customers save power — there needs to be some kind of informational device, like a Web site, that will tell customers how much power they’re using. “
Enter Greenbox… This story is a great validation of our market and what we are working to accomplish as a company. It’s great to see the main stream media getting on board!
