🧃Your meter knows your favorite TV show
(157) Wildfires vs. Aviation
Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Canada's Record-breaking 2023 Wildfires Released Nearly 4 Times More Carbon than Global Aviation (WRI)
U.S. Department of Energy: $63.5 Million to Support Commercialization of Transformative Energy Technologies (CT)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Samsara Eco, a startup replacing plastic packaging with green alternatives, raised $65M in funding led by Temasek and Main Sequence(TC)
Princeton NuEnergy, a lithium-ion battery recycling startup, raised a $30M Series A led by Samsung and Helium-3 Ventures (PRN)
LD Carbon, a Korean producer of recovered carbon black, raised a $28M Series C led by Toyota’s Woven Capital (FN)
Climate X, a startup helping financial firms price the climate change impacts on physical assets, raised an $18M Series A led by GV (TC)
Tender, a food tech startup creating cuts of alternative meat, raised an $11M Series A led by Rhapsody Venture Partners (FN)
Material science startup Maxterial raised an $8M Series A led by Helios Climate Ventures (FN)
Kilimo, a startup helping farmers save water, raised a $7.5M Series A led by Emerald Technology Ventures (TC)
Carbon removal startup Net Zero Company raised a $5.5M seed round led by Oilinvest, VARO Energy, and SilviCarbon (FN)
VoltR, a French lithium batteries startup, raised $4.4M in funding led by C4 Ventures, Exergon, and more (FN)
Aikido Technologies, a floating wind startup, raised a $4M seed round led by Azolla Ventures (BW)
Green Theory
Your meter knows your favorite TV show
If you locate your home utility meter, you're almost guaranteed to find a digital "smart" meter. Since around 2010, US utilities have replaced the perfectly functional ticking analog meters that once adorned every dwelling, sometimes at gunpoint. Why revamp an unusually performant pillar in our crumbling grid infrastructure? And who bared arms and sent suspicious packages to stop it?
To ask a modern smart meter founder, the first wave crashed poorly due to being too dumb. But those defending their old meters with firearms begged to differ about the new digital devices' intelligence. Advanced Metering Infrastructure 1.0 (AMI 1.0) swept away the induction watt-hour machines that served us reliably for nearly a century. Over the course of about a decade, gone were the monthly visits from utility meter readers.
Cost Cutting
As utilities lost their monopoly on power production, and electricity demand peaked, they grew increasingly keen on harvesting opportunities on the consumer side. AMI 1.0 promised lucrative savings on monthly onsite bill readings, and increased responsiveness to power outages. Whereas before utilities relied on telephone calls from impacted customers to triangulate outages, now your electricity provider likely texts or calls you about the outage before you can even reach for your phone.
While this enhanced visibility demonstrates the potential of new meters, it also holds the kernel of their greatest power and perceived threat, as well as where they failed to deliver on promises to American households.
Data Dump
Smart meters offered some simple benefits for the hassle of installing a hundred million of them, but they also quietly slurpred up loads of new useful data to revolutionize the grid. Utilities pitched this revolution to the nation by explaining how more granular energy sensing would help optimize our existing capacity, and deliver savings on energy prices. Historically, utilities could balance the grid by controlling electricity production with fine flows of fossil fuels on one end, and a steadily increasing demand on the home side. Since the rise of intermittent renewables and non-utility power production (from home rooftops to wind farms), utilities needed a better sense of electricity needs than lagging monthly datapoints and large aggregates of load. With a clearer picture of electricity demand, utilities could get nimbler, and eventually take some control over our peak energy uses.
Indeed, the new meters were so smart they could go far beyond knowing when the dishwasher was running. As Gretchen Bakke writes in The Grid, "A German research team proved in 2011 that... digital meters can reveal... even what television program you are watching." Many folks found this overly invasive, while most unknowingly watched the transformation unfold. If you still have an analog induction meter, send us a picture of that relic!
In exchange for this peek inside our homes, utilities would build toward Jetsons-level home automation and control for us all. But today, most smart homes are a patchwork of lightbulbs and toilet paper ordering devices. Utilities got a lot of data, but they hadn't figured out how to get it back to us in a useful format. If smart meters 1.0 didn't give us smart homes, did they at least save us money? Undoubtedly, utilities saved on costs, but whether these have been passed on to households is less clear. What went wrong?
The empathy gap
Utilities may have learned a lot about our electricity use, but they lacked a key piece of the puzzle in not having any control over the appliances they could now granularly sense. Their supposed partners in this operation were we, the appliance users, and utilities would provide us insights about when to switch certain devices on or off, to save money. While everyone loves saving money, almost no one wants to fuss over their electricity use. Even worse, utilities failed to provide timely information back to consumers for much of the first wave of smart meters, so even the motivated energy nerds couldn't act on their new home energy technology.
This challenge still haunts consumer-facing grid solutions: we must either surrender some control over our appliances, or some time spent fussing over them. For the grid tech professionals building for this audience, it may be easy to forget how forgettable most folks find the grid.
New wave smart meters and beyond
Today, AMI 2.0 boasts enhanced security protocols and a wider gamut of real consumer choice when it comes to information and control. Utilities have rolled out far more timing-based rates, with predictable savings on a daily basis, and can offer specific rates for uses such as EV charging. This implementation of data from the first wave has helped craft a new environment where more efficient use of our grid can finally pay.
When it comes to household visibility into our own load data, the last decade has taken us far beyond AMI 1.0. The first wave of smart meters cost anywhere from $600-$1800 to install, and left nearly all ratepayers in the dark on their own data. New ones, however, can be purchased by anyone for a couple hundred dollars, and provide granular insights directly to households. Computing has advanced fast enough that these meters perform calculations on their own, even at a lower price point, helping unlock the ability for households to access information, with no intermediary utility processing.
The chance to affordably manage appliances on digital timers or via automated flows keeps getting better, too. As long as innovators mind the empathy gap, and pay attention to the human factors in stabilizing the grid through digital innovation, we might finally get the smart meter revolution we were promised.
The Closer
Squirrels are curious creatures and may occasionally interact with flowers. Although it’s not common to see, they sometimes stop to smell or investigate them. Credit