Host: James McWalter
Guest: Deirdre Lord | Co-Founder | The Megawatt Hour
Category: ⚡ Renewable Energy
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[0:15] “The Megawatt Hour aims to minimize cost and usage for commercial and industrial customers and improve business outcomes by transforming utility data into actionable information.”
[1:43] “We acknowledged that there were plenty of power suppliers, there were plenty of consultants and brokers, but there was no information resource that linked markets to customers, that provided transparency around their cost and usage. And if you look at other deregulated markets, that kind of platform exists. In financial services, you can go to Schwab online and see how your investments are performing. There was no such thing in our industry. And so that was the genesis, the spark behind building the Megawatt Hour.”
[8:25] “We came to understand very quickly that customers are not going to type in lots of utility data. They will give us the permission to access their utility data directly. And once they do that, we do all the setup in the backend, it's all automated. […] When we get a customer's utility information and permission, it takes us anywhere from half an hour to maybe a couple of hours to get the information to the customer and get them the forecasting capability and the pricing data.”
[21:16] “Transparency is still challenging, but I think interestingly as customers and as the CNI (Critical National Infrastructure) market has shifted more towards ESG goals, and broader sustainability goals, there is this philosophy that is integral to that is having more transparency around data and analytics. Unfortunately, I would say the one area we haven't made as much progress on is just ease of access to data. That still is extremely fragmented in the United States, and I believe is still a significant constraint to a real and significant and fast transition to a new energy economy.”
[35:15] “Customers still don't have enough resources to evaluate the financial impacts of different decisions. […] My vision back in the early 90s, when I first got out of graduate school was that I wanted to see essentially significantly more distributed solutions to get to a more carbon neutral society. And so I still don't think we quite have the ideal structure for micro grids. And […] I continue to be convinced that our economy and our energy infrastructure will only be more distributed. And I think that we're still a pretty long way from making that happen. And there are a lot of pieces that need to be added to that puzzle.”
Rating: ⚡⚡
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🕰️ 41 min | 🗓️ 02/22/2022
✅ Time saved: 39 min
