Tuesday, September 23, 2008
What Credit Crunch?
Smart grid player GridPoint snaps up $120 million in financing.
The severe credit crisis rippling
through the markets didn't stop GridPoint--an
Arlington, VA, startup that makes software for smart management of the
power grid--from securing $120 million in equity financing, announced
yesterday. "Really high quality deals will continue to get funded, despite the
current turmoil," Peter Corsell, the company's president and CEO (and a member
of this year's TR35),
told me at a smart-grid conference in Washington,
D.C. He said the money will be used to acquire
other startups, starting with V2Green, a company that makes smart-grid software
for recharging plug-in hybrids and other electric vehicles. GridPoint is a key player in an effort to
upgrade the power grid in Boulder, CO, working with utilities including Duke
Energy and Xcel Energy. GridPoint's software provides utilities and consumers a
Web-based portal to manage and control electrical demand; it can do things like
shut off electric water heaters and pool pumps temporarily in times of high
demand. To date, GridPoint has raised more than $220 million.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
There is a need to open the demand side of the power industry to enable the development of the resourses of the demand side. The smart grid should remain a closed market that guarantees a responsibility to transport instead of a responsibility to serve. To open the demand side means obliterating the obsolete business model of winning rate cases to the regulator and enabling business model innovations under competition in the retail market.
Aug 29, 2008. A comment to update this post was deleted today. The key insight is in the link to the EWPC article Let’s Avoid Many Expensive Fiascos which shows the power utilities price control business models are in a dead end and that regulators are making excessive risks that will go into customers' pockets as soon as the new investments go into infant mortality or premature obsolescence. The articles’ summary reads:
There is no need to cite any [analytical] evidence “to enable a highly competitive, pro-consumer, complete and fully functional market architecture and design paradigm shift.” What is needed is to have “the global power industry … get out of the wrong jungle to produce a EWPC based EPAct as soon as possible.”
Three key references are Warren Causey’s article Utilities Full Speed Ahead on IUE/SG: The Question is What to do First, the EWPC article Utilities and Regulators’ Value Destruction, and the EWPC article Leadership Answers What to do First.
javs
09/24/2008
Posts:95
And using the current financial crisis as an eye-catcher.
Perhaps they should purchase advertising space elsewhere.
rexromani
09/24/2008
Posts:2
NFoug
10/13/2008
Posts:1