Podcast
Podcast
- 29 Mar 2023
- Climate Rising
WeaveGrid's AI Solution for EV-to-Grid Integration
Resources
- WeaveGrid company profile
- BCG report: The Costs of Revving Up the Grid for Electric Vehicles
- Climate Rising episode mentioned: U.S. DOE’s Jigar Shah & the State of Carbon Removal
Guests
Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative
Apoorv Bhargava, CEO and Co-founder, WeaveGrid
Transcript
Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.
Mike Toffel:
This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I’m your host, Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS.
In today’s episode, I’m talking with Apoorv Bhargava, CEO and co-founder of WeaveGrid. His company is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help electric utilities integrate the growing supply of renewable energy and the growing demand from EVs.
I’ll ask him about the challenges and opportunities he sees in the electric utility and transportation sectors, and how WeaveGrid approaches them as systems problem that can be solved with prediction and optimization models. And, as usual, I’ll ask him to share some advice for those interested in working at the intersection of business and climate change. Here’s my interview with Apoorv Bhargava from WeaveGrid.
Apoorv, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.
Apoorv Bhargava:
My pleasure. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Mike Toffel:
Terrific. Well, let's start with just an introduction. What's your role at WeaveGrid and a bit about how you got there?
Apoorv Bhargava:
I'm the co-founder and CEO of WeaveGrid, and I think my former colleagues at Stanford GSB would be very upset to hear that I'm on an HBS podcast before theirs, but that is a part of the journey here in starting WeaveGrid. My whole life, I've been really passionate about this broader area of energy, climate and the systems problem that the climate is. Part of it was driven by the fact that I had the opportunity and privilege of growing up across the world. I was born in India, grew up most of my life in the Eastern Mediterranean out in Cyprus. And as I was doing so, we went through these series of events that I think just kept accelerating that interest in a variety of ways, in the broader energy and climate question. There's some pretty severe droughts out in the mid '90s where we ran out of water, and that's first exposed me to an interest in resource questions.
And I would go back to visit family in India and would always see air pollution issues, and energy issues, and power outages, and so forth. And that got me really interested in what the questions and challenges were around human development and potential for humans if we had more access to resources. And then, finally, in the early 2000s, the Iraq war was very much front and center in the eastern Mediterranean, given Cyprus is a pretty geostrategic location, and the Royal Air Force has forward operating bases out there. So, we got exposed to that. And I think for me, that was really my aha moment of climate is this massive systems risk multiplier on top of a very complex systems problem of energy and access to resources, and geopolitics, and human development, and so forth.
And so, that took me down a path of just going really, really deep in energy. Several years later, ended up in college out in Houston, was a chemical engineer and an energy economist there. And initially thought to myself, I'm going to go get a PhD, save the world that way. But found that neither the academic track nor the research track really tickled my fancy. And so, I ended up actually, believe it or not, applying to business school, and worked initially in management consulting. Started off at BCG in their energy and utilities portfolio out in Houston. Spent a few years after that at a startup called OPower out in Washington, DC where they were building software for utilities, particularly focused on energy efficiency software, and loved that experience, just learned so much.
And so, at Stanford, I was getting my MS and my MBA. That was really where this question started coming up into my head, which was how do we start to think about the coming together of two massive industries? The automotive industry and the utility industry. And these two industries combined make up about 60, 62% of all emissions. And that coming together of the two industries via electrification is an incredible opportunity to actually accelerate the decarbonization transition. And so, that's where the genesis of WeaveGrid started.
Mike Toffel:
Terrific. Very interesting journey. And I would say, this is my plug for MBA programs. MBA programs even outside of HBS can be really useful skill-building places to help people get into this business and climate space.
Apoorv Bhargava:
Yes.
Mike Toffel:
So, I'm glad to talk to someone who experienced that.
Apoorv Bhargava:
I couldn't agree more. I think MBA programs are a place where you learn how to build and scale organizations and how to be a leader. And I think that leadership training is so critical as we think about climate transition. Because people ask me, "How do I break into climate?" And I always say to them, "Climate is the rewriting of the global economy." We are rewriting the global economy with a view towards decarbonization. And so, if MBAs have skills and value in any business, they will have skills and value in any business that is moving towards the decarbonized future. And I think learning how to scale businesses is going to be a really critical need as we think about the challenge ahead of us in the decarbonization transition. So, I'm 100% with you.
Mike Toffel:
Great. Yeah, that's good. I'm going to use your remarks to my students.
Apoorv Bhargava:
There we go.
Mike Toffel:
Let's dive into WeaveGrid. You are out there working first at BCG, then OPower. And then, you decided to co-found a company in this space. So, tell us a little bit about what WeaveGrid does. What's its target? How does it add value?
Apoorv Bhargava:
My co-founder and I met in grad school. John, my co-founder, was getting his PhD at Stanford. I was getting my MBA. That very classic PhD meets MBA story, in some sense. But ironically, ours was not a lab spin out or anything of that kind. Ours has always been a problem and a solution, a problem that we saw coming, something that we knew was going to be an inevitable problem. And in some ways, the solution almost felt obviously inevitable too, but nobody was doing it. And that was why we decided to create it. Taking a step back, you've got two very siloed physical systems. Today, when you think about the fossil-driven infrastructure, you turn on your electricity, that's probably some natural gas power plant firing up somewhere, delivering electrons to your neighborhood, to your home.
And then, you get into your ICE–internal combustion engine car–and you go off to a gas station to go fill it up, then drive off wherever you need to go. That's the world we live in today. The world we are living in tomorrow is going to be one where you have, yes, still a lot of centralized renewable generation, and of course, increasing amounts of decentralized renewable generation and clean energy generation, as well as electric cars that actually mostly charge at home in your single family home, or your apartment, or your workplace even. And now, all of those cars as they're plugging in, are actually going to be dependent on an electric grid that was never built to deal with EVs as a use case.
And now, for context here, 280 million cars is more than double the number of households in the United States. And so, just the sheer volume of vehicles that'll happen there, that means that suddenly, the electric grid is going to have a dependency on those vehicles and the batteries inside of those vehicles. For some kind of service, whether it's just a better charging management, whether it's eventually sending power back out to the grid, whatever it is, those vehicles have to interact now in a much more integrated fashion.
And so, the question we asked ourselves was, as these two S-curves are picking up in both the utility and the automotive space, driven entirely by decarbonization as this mega trend underlying both, what other trends are happening? And the big one was digitization. There is a huge trend of digitization and moving to the cloud in the last 10 years in both of these industries, but again, happening in completely siloed ways. And so, when the physical silos are about to meet and interact, and become integrated into one giant integrated system, why should the digital silos do that as well?
And in fact, you realize that the need for a system orchestrator, somebody who can sit somewhere in between the 3,000 utilities, and at the same time, the 20 plus automakers that are out there, global automakers that are out there that are building more and more electric vehicles every day, every year, that system's orchestrator and the system's integrator is so necessary because being able to manage those cars in an intelligent way, such that as a customer, you and I, don't have to ever worry about our car being charged by the cleanest, cheapest, most reliable electricity, and also, have our car available to us whenever we need it, but also so that the utility can be reassured that their grid is going to be kept reliable by all these vehicles coming on. And that the automakers can also find a way to actually leverage these vehicles that they're producing for additional value streams.
And that was the crux of it. The question was can we create a win-win-win solution for everyone? And what we realized is this isn't a problem we can solve through just one-off transactions and one-off partnerships with people. We have to actually build a software platform and a machine learning platform to actually go resolve this because we need that machine intelligence to resolve what is a much more complex problem than human intelligence can do alone. So, that's how we got started.
Mike Toffel:
Yeah. Great. Let me catalog what I think I'm hearing so far as terms of the problems that you're going after. And some of them were implied in your remarks, so let me know if I get these wrong. One is with the great transition that we're going through toward electric vehicles, this will dramatically increase the amount of demand coming through on the grid. So, there's a grid reliability question at play. Can the grid support all these automobiles, especially if they all tend to charge at roughly similar times, like when people come home from work, and they all plug it in, or when they arrive at work, and they all plug it in? It's going to lead to these spikes in demand, which the grid is currently not well-equipped to manage. That's one question, that's grid capacity as we move to EV, right? That's one problem.
Apoorv Bhargava:
Yep. And it's an exceptional summary of what I was trying to say.
Mike Toffel:
Okay, well, but there's more, right? But then, you're saying customers themselves have preferences about, for example, the wholesale market electricity changes in cleanliness or greenness over time of day, and it varies also in cost. And so, if folks want to have their car charged, not necessarily exactly the moment it plugs in, but it's sometime between it plugs in and when I need it, and maybe have the an algorithm figure out what's the right moment, you're solving on the one hand, the reliability to avoid peaks on the system, but you're also perhaps solving some preferences that customers have in terms of the type of electricity. Electrons are electrons, but they're not all produced the same. They don't all cost the same. And that seems like a whole other set of problems you're solving as well.
Apoorv Bhargava:
That's exactly right. Yeah, I can give you a couple of examples of where we're doing this around the country.
Mike Toffel:
Great.
Apoorv Bhargava:
For example, on the East Coast with the Exelon Utilities. Exelon is the largest utility holding company in the country. Baltimore Gas and Electric, Pepco, Delmarza, and ComEd out in Chicago, few different utilities. With some of their operating companies out on the East Coast, we're essentially helping drivers manage their charging. And the way we're doing that is we're just automating it, we’re taking advantage of the connectivity that is enabled in all of your vehicles today and a lot of your chargers today, and we're able to actually help drivers have their charging managed for them on their behalf by their utility in a way where they're actually getting the cheapest off-peak charging possible.
So, electricity prices are sometimes on peak, they're sometimes off-peak. It's not a perfect reflection of the actual cost of delivering said energy to you as a customer, but it's a good enough proxy, and it's the rate that we all see in our bills. And so, when a driver signs up, they actually end up getting the cheapest charging possible by doing so along with additional rebates for participating. And what that allows us to do is build a much better predictive analytics set for the utility where we can actually start to predict down to an asset level what's going to happen as more and more cars come online, so that we can avoid those problems, especially as we start moving into much more of that optimization phase where we're automating how that car charges.
Moving to another example specifically on the automation side, in the Midwest with Xcel Energy, which is another one of the largest utilities in the country, we're actually automating the charging to exactly what you said, those times when wind energy production is highest. So, in the Midwest, there is sometimes too much wind energy being generated in any moment in time, too much supply versus the demand at hand. And so, rather than curtailing or dumping that wind energy, we send signals to folks' cars telling them to, basically, men telling their cars to start charging in those moments such that they get access to incredibly cheap electricity, but also, get access to what is incredibly clean energy. And so, that's a really, really important thing.
And then, out on the west coast with Pacific Gas and Electric where almost one in every five EVs lies within their territories in northern California, there's this huge question around the grid reliability, particularly, I would say climate change fueled grid reliability factors. Unfortunately, due to the changing climate, there is a lot of forests that have just died out, and that can cause wildfires to break out, especially if there's high winds and so forth. And so, very intelligently, the utility has started saying, "Okay, look, we're going to preemptively shut off parts of the lines to avoid any kind of sparks and so forth in this tinderbox that forests have become in parts of northern California."
It's a really unfortunate thing for customers though, because you have your power shut off potentially. And as we've moved to a world where mobility is increasingly linked to the grid, how do you ensure mobility resiliency as much as you're ensuring grid resiliency? How do you make sure that your car is also able to take you somewhere? And so with PG&E, we designed a program where not only do customers get access to cheaper charging and we can automate their charging for off-peak, et cetera, but we're also able to actually manage it such that in these events, where preemptively, the power has to get shut off, we're able to actually alert and manage those cars in such a way such that instead of somebody waking up and finding their power out and their car's only at 20% state of charge, now they have 100% fully charged battery. If they want to drive off to a community center, they want to go off to Grandma's, whenever else, they can do so. And hopefully, in the next couple hours, when the power's back on, they're all ready to go.
Mike Toffel:
Wow, it's really interesting. Let's talk a moment about the cost versus price story here, because of course, costs are varying all the time on the wholesale market, and customers are largely shielded from those variations in the short term until there's a rate hike or something like that. And maybe they see one price all the time, or maybe the price changes monthly. Or you mentioned there's some places where they see a peak and an off-peak price. What does the pricing story at the consumer level look like in the markets you're operating in?
Apoorv Bhargava:
The key is we don't even want you to be thinking about us there. We are very much out there in the background enabling you to sign up for this program by going to your local utilities page, signing in with your utility account, signing in with your automotive account. Increasingly, you'll have your Tesla app, your Toyota app, your whatever car companies app. And so, you just have to connect through those two entities. And then, we're going out there and doing the heavy lifting on the data and integration of those data sets and data fields, and then, starting to build out the predictive machine learning components, and the optimizations, and so forth.
But to you as a customer, you just get to go in and say, "I want my car fully charged by these times." you receive a varying amount of incentive depending on whatever your utility and the regulators determined. And then, really, it's a plug it in and set and forget. Don't really think about this too much. And when you log back into your account, you can see how much money you're saving on your charging. You can see how much you've saved relative to driving a gas car. You can see whether or not your charging has been done in the smartest way possible. There's all these little experience elements that allow you as a consumer to feel very much in control of your charging and your charging decisions. But really, the key is that it's about making it super easy for you as a consumer, so you don't have to think about all these factors.
Mike Toffel:
Got it. And so, yes, this incentive from utilities piece was a piece of the story that I hadn't appreciated because most folks maybe get to choose which generator if they want to have their normal utility generation of electricity or they opt into a greener portfolio. And those tend to have a fixed price per kilowatt hour, at least in the markets I've lived in.
Apoorv Bhargava:
That's right.
Mike Toffel:
And so, I was wondering how does this savings get passed on to consumers? Or are consumers more just happy about the timing, which might shift the profile of the electron generation capacity? And you're sharing here that this incentive piece, whether it's a sign-on incentive, a monthly incentive, or a per kilowatt incentive, depending presumably on the market, that's how consumers are being enticed to opt into these programs.
Apoorv Bhargava:
Yeah, there's three savings mechanisms I think about for consumers in general. There's what I would call the participation incentive or the participating program incentive. There's what I would call cost savings through your rates, so rate or bill savings. And then, the third one is what I would call for both non-participants and participants, what I would call overall systems benefits. And so, the first one is pretty self-evident. If I'm giving you an incentive of some kind, then great, you get $50, $100, whatever that is from your local utility for participating. Thank you so much for allowing us to work with you For making a better grid. I think the second one is exactly as we talked about, if you're charging at certain times because your rate allows you said flexibility, you're actually receiving more economic value, and you're able to save your $20 a night or whatever, or a month, or whatever from charging off-peak.
And then, the third one is actually probably one of the most critical ones, which is that I actually am so much less worried about electrification's impact on crashing the grid It's more about what is the cost implication, cost measured in both the amount of assets that have to be upgraded or time delays in getting equipment out onto the field in order to electrify everything. And I think the cost implications of electrification, if not managed well, are actually extremely high. And I think that's the challenge that we're trying to avoid. One of the primary pillars in our technology DNA is how do we enable that cost to come down tremendously? And I think a study of my former employer, BCG, talked about this point, which was that, look, the grid costs, we could be looking at 20% increase in rates if we don't manage this.
And I think to be very clear, to be managing it in a much more intelligent way was their way of saying, "This is what a theoretical limit could be," but the technology just weren't out there to actually go out and optimize in that hyper-local, hyper-specific manner, in a way that really tries to eke out every ounce of efficiency in the system. And that's what we've built is an incredibly intelligent machine learning product or suite of products that can do so. And that, I think is so important because that cost efficiency is given back to all stakeholders, all rate payers, all customers. Whether or not you drive an EV today, whether you choose to not drive a car. And I think that's a really important saving that most of us don't think about.
Mike Toffel:
And in the background of all this is, I suppose, just how many additional power plants are we going to have to build, site, zone, approve in order to accommodate this electrify everything movement, which is moving not only transportation to electrical sources, but also heat, for example, with heat pumps and such. And the whole electrify movement is these estimates are enormous as far as the additional electrons that'll be required. So, I think what you're saying is there's two ways to build effective capacity. One is we're going to build more power plants, no doubt. And how can we smooth out demand so that we most effectively use them, so that we don't build a whole bunch that are only used in narrow circumstances, so that we have grid reliability. Let's see what we can do with offsetting that demand to shave off those peaks.
Apoorv Bhargava:
That's exactly right. A former guest on this podcast, Jigar Shah, he talks about the concept of virtual power plants, so aggregation of resources that allow you to both offset demand, but also, just fill in the gaps or really balance supply as an aggregation of demand side resources. you talked about power plants and the need to build power plant infrastructure. The actual bigger problem with electrification is more about the very brittle grid infrastructure. The grid is made up of generation, transmission and distribution, and it's actually the poles, and wires, and the grid part that's really, really going to be the very expensive part of this transition if we don't manage this more intelligently. And so, what we're trying to do is augment that real infrastructure, make it more intelligent, actually enable us to leverage it more effectively, and not have to go out and just whole hog upgrade everything because that's just really, really costly, and it will slow down the transition.
And this is maybe my hot take for the podcast, but we often talk about this idea that the energy transition will be costly. The truth is a non-transmission is far more costly. Lives are lost every day because of the amount of air pollution driven by incredibly terrible emissions from polluting vehicles, polluting factories, polluting infrastructure. Obviously, the climate impacts are incredibly high, whether it be natural disasters and so forth. Or just the shifting yields of crops, stuff like that. There's a ton of cost already. And so, I think we have to look at it in a holistic systems oriented way. And I think one of the central premises of WeaveGrid is let's build a system solution that actually creates value for all stakeholders involved in order to tackle what is a huge systems problem in climate change.
Mike Toffel:
Yeah, no, I agree with all that. The challenge of course, is if there's the balancing the system. It could be that you need to spend 5 cents more in one bill in order to save 20 cents elsewhere. Well, you still are looking at that 5 cents in that one bill going like, "Oh, this feels more expensive."
Apoorv Bhargava:
That's right.
Mike Toffel:
And even if it's more than offset by the benefits that accrue system-wide, even system-wide that affect you as an individual.
Apoorv Bhargava:
Yeah, that's such great point. And it's one which, when I often, nowadays, when friends ask me, "Hey, should I go buy an EV?" I'm like, "Yeah, you should. And I'll tell you why. Look at the amount you're spending every month on gasoline because you do own a car." The problem is we as humans don't think of our energy system, our individual energy system. We think of it as, my electric bill, my gas bill, and then, my monthly car payment, and my gasoline spending on that. But if I actually took my gasoline spending, my insurance, all those other payments, the whole energy part of transportation, and the energy part of electricity and gas, and I combined those two, and then, I said, "Okay, let's electrify that," you end up finding that yes, there are upfront payments, perhaps that seem a little more expensive, but then, the overall cost comes down pretty dramatically, even if some amount of rate increases.
Mike Toffel:
Yeah. System problems are notoriously challenging.
Apoorv Bhargava:
Yes. Yes.
Mike Toffel:
I wanted to draw in one of the areas you mentioned earlier, which was part of the grid stability piece is not just offsetting when you charge, but perhaps also using the batteries and reversing that flow so that it supports the grid in moments where the grid could use some support, and getting customers to agree to use their auto batteries in a two-way exchange. Is that something that you're implementing or thinking about, and what is the customer acceptance and regulatory issues in reversing that flow?
Apoorv Bhargava:
Yeah, it's definitely an exciting proposition. If the battery that I purchased for mobility purposes could be leveraged in moments where I really don't need it for mobility or I don't value the optionality of my mobility, as what could I do by sending a few electrons back to the grid? to answer your question, it's definitely something we think about. Ultimately, if you're orchestrating vehicles, whether it's one-way management of the vehicles or whether it's two-way flow of the electrons, it doesn't matter to us. Ultimately, it still is a thing that needs to be done. The biggest thing that's required though for any vehicle to home, vehicle to building, vehicle to grid applications, this technology, this enabling technology as it were, is much more sophisticated hardware. And I think part of the reason is today, if you take a car home, you are actually just plug in a car into a 110 outlet in your garage, in your wall anywhere. Honestly, if you want to run an extension cord down from your bedroom, you can do that.
You can also plug in your car into your dryer outlet and get 220 volt charging, and that's also going to completely work fine, and buy yourself a charger, a box if you want, but you don't even have to do that. You have the option with a little to no added infrastructure to charge your car. However, if you want to make it two-way compatible, it does require more sophisticated hardware. And so, it's not that the vehicles won't be capable, it's not that the hardware isn't starting to become commercially ready, and it's not that the utilities aren't starting to think about it. It's just that all of those things have to happen at the same time. And then, there has to be an economic value case for the optimizer, the decision maker, both the customer of course, the enabling decision maker, and then, the machine optimization to say, "Hey, sending back electrons to the grid should be able to create some value," especially if there's a cost function there. And there is. One, they have less access to my vehicle. Two, it might cause degradation.
Increasingly, a lot of vehicles don't have degradation problems associated with any vehicle integrated. Some of them do. I don't think that we should consider the technology to be monolithic in the battery space right now. And so, that cost optimization and that value to cost problem needs to be resolved. And that's something of course, we are more than happy to help and are supporting partners on. But the hardware and the vehicles getting out there, that Venn diagram that I'm talking about, that hasn't hit scale yet in the residential system. So, you're seeing some really exciting pilots. We're supporting some partners on thinking about more and more of those pilots, but what we haven't yet gotten to is a stage where there's enough deployment of hardware, there's enough consumers ready to go, and so forth.
There's been some really exciting work out in Europe, but less so here in the US. I think on the fleet side, you're seeing it more north because I think you'll find more willing customers for sure in the commercial segment who are willing to go pilot something out at one location or another location. But not as much yet on the resident site. I don't think it's that far away. I also think you're going to start seeing it much more in the vehicle to home backup application because that's one place where customers are really excited about having the ability to back up their home in case the power goes out for a few hours at a time, at the very least. And the F-150 Lightnings really helped make that reality come to life. Yeah, pretty excited to see the development that's happening right now.
Mike Toffel:
Great. Yeah, that F-150 has a great ad if I remember correctly.
Apoorv Bhargava:
Great ad.
Mike Toffel:
There's a storm that knocks out power to the house, and then, no worries. You've got this plugged in, so you have backup battery. Lights come back on your laptop fires back up, things like that. So, does it give you a head start if you have home solar that you already are living in a place where you can feed that to the grid in moments where the grid requires it? Does that give you a head start for the battery system to also feed back into the grid, or is it different technology?
Apoorv Bhargava:
Okay. Yeah, that's a great question. Maybe I'll start with another point though very quickly before moving back to the question about solar, which is first of all, I love the fact that you remember that ad. Just going back to the marketing case studies in business school and all of that, isn't it amazing that we're at a place where the Super Bowl has ads? The Super Bowl, the marketing event of the year has ads for an energy or a clean energy product. That's just amazing to me that we are at that place, and I think this is one of the things that makes EVs so exciting and different. you've never seen a Super Bowl ad for a clean light bulb or a LED. But you have seen one for many, many different kinds of electric vehicles.
To get into that specific question of how does home solar help? It definitely does, and I think when you're somebody who has home solar, adding a vehicle that is capable of at least bidirectionality back to your home is very possible. But look, I think the broader point is this. Consumers are going to be choosing different products and services based on their needs, based on their financial capabilities, based on what they value, what their rates are, what their options are. And I think some folks will have solar and an EV. Some folks will have no solar and an EV. But I think it is inevitable that we move towards an electric future, at least in the light duty space. The automotive industry has concluded that, and it's a place where pretty much every major automaker is investing towards. And it's been driven somewhat by regulation, but it's also been driven by consumer choice, and price points, and technology curves, learning curves.
So, I think as we start moving to a place where one, two cars per household go electric, you're going to start seeing a lot of new products and services coming out around that consumer experience of being electric. But it continues to be a critical challenge, which is what happens as you put all these cars out there, and how do they interact with the grid that is going to support them? Is it going to make them capable of having said mobility value? You could do absolutely nothing from a grid value perspective, and you could just let your car exist as a car that happens to be driven by electricity, but the fact that you decide to plug in your car at home, at work, whenever, creates some systems cost. And so, I think the big question inevitably is what are the other things we want to bundle that with, whether it's solar or batteries or just smarter rates, smarter charging, and much more sophisticated vehicle to home or vehicle to grid? All of those things allow you to build a much more intelligent grid in the long run.
Mike Toffel:
Great. I've been so enthralled by the business model and by the opportunity here that I've almost forgetting to ask a key question here, which is this discussion about WeaveGrid comes after our conversations recently with BCG and with Google to learn about how companies are using artificial intelligence, or AI, or machine learning in their efforts to help decarbonize. You have prediction models, you touched on that a moment ago. There's optimization. Can you talk a little bit about the modeling side of the business? Exactly what are you predicting? And then, how. And then, how do you then shift to the optimization question?
Apoorv Bhargava:
Great, love that. When you think about the driver or the customer experience, today, there is no integrated model that a utility, or if you were on the transportation side, no utility or automaker is really thinking in this integrated manner. And to make an integrated model that says, "How do I as a consumer make the decision to drive my car? Or how do I predict the decisions that I make as a consumer where I drive my car, and hence, due to my driving behavior that is unmodeled, let's say, I then make a series of charging decisions? And then, how do those charging decisions impact the demand that is generated on me as a utility down to not just the overall kilowatts at a systems level, but down to that local asset level?"
So, basically, what is that demand at every single point on the entire network from the power plant through to the local transformer? And that model is completely unbuilt because again, transportation has never been something that I needed to keep in mind as I built my stochastic models about what your local neighborhood needed when I was designing a neighborhood feeder, or a neighborhood substation, or a neighborhood transformer. And just said, "Okay, look, four to eight homes, somebody's going to have a dryer, somebody's going to have a fridge, somebody's going to have air conditioning. Maybe everyone has air conditioning in a place like Florida." What then? It's only going to require a max of this amount. Let's give it some buffer. Bam. That's my asset sizing.
Now, when everyone starts driving an electric vehicle, or heck, not even everyone, if one to five people in the neighborhood drive electric vehicles where every single EV charging is equivalent to two new households were a subload, even if it's instantaneous, even if it's only for couple hours at a time when the cars are charging, that lack of model demand, particularly down to the individual topology, is something that's a really difficult problem. And so, how do you solve what is becoming a much more dynamic prediction problem?
Well, first you need to forecast it. You need to understand it. You need to be able to look further in the future and say, "How does it continue creating challenges for me?" And then, you need to close the loop and say, "Let's optimize it. Let's actually start to suggest certain times and automations such that it closes out that problem." And even better, one day, it could start to predict when the need for an upgrade is eventually going to be there. And I think that's one of the way we think about it, perhaps a very specific vignette like this, but then, we really need machine intelligence to augment the human intelligence that has allowed us to build such an incredible grid over the last 120 years.
Look, I continue to be a huge advocate for the fact that the electric grid is one of the greatest ventures of mankind. And so, how do we augment that? You need machine intelligence, especially as we move to a world where again, we're going to have hundreds of millions, hundreds of millions of new devices coming online, all of these devices with huge batteries, huge computers. And now, they're actually going to be able to provide both the data and the flexibility to make the grid a much more intelligent place.
Mike Toffel:
Yeah, very interesting. What is the future of WeaveGrid? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities you see in the coming years?
Apoorv Bhargava:
That's something that of course, investors love to ask me about, and I often say to them, I'm like, "Look, we're building a platform. We're building a platform that sits at the intersection of two multi-trillion dollar industries." When you go in and look at the logo list of partners we have on both sides, you're like, "Wait a second, these are companies that are in the Fortune 10, Fortune 50. What the hell are you guys doing?" I think part of it is they're looking for folks to really come in and be their partner in this very tumultuous time. And I always come back to the fact that we have to build immense amounts of trust with these partners in solving what feels like very inevitable problem, but it doesn't mean that we are the inevitable solution.
And so, when you build trust, it gives you a right to explore more and more things. And so, yes, today, we've started out as a EV-focused company, and I think it's the most exciting thing. It's the thing that is unlike any other resource. It's changing exponentially. And I keep saying humans have difficulty in thinking exponentially. It's something that definitely, it's a place where machine learning and AI can really play an incredible role. But as we keep moving to an all-electric future, as we keep moving to a greater and greater clean energy future, there's going to be more opportunities to explore given the platform, the technology platform, and I think the partner platform that we're building. And so, an area that we've started thinking more and more about is what do we want to do as fleets go all-electric?
Are there other places where we can augment a lot of other companies that are out there building that fleet-charging infrastructure for EV fleets? We've started having those early conversations. As more distributed resources like solar panels come on, well, what does that mean to, again, that systems orchestration? Does it mean that we need to be thinking more about the interplay between other resources aside from EVs on that network problem that we are solving?
So, there's a whole bunch of other questions that have come to our mind. I think right now, we like being known as the EV company. Increasingly, I think in our space, there's lots of players in this space thinking about grid optimization, but I think everyone has this view that if I can do this other asset type and I can do this other asset type, and EVs are so easy. And I keep saying, "Good luck, guys." Thinking about how people move, and behave, and how they want to use their car, that's a very different thing from understanding how a thermostat functions inside of a home. Yeah, I think for us, we want to be really focused for now, and I think we'll take the opportunities where they come in the future as we have a right to play.
Mike Toffel:
Great. Final question. For those of our listeners who are thinking about getting into the climate and business space, imagine, go back to your MBA colleagues or folks who are currently in MBA programs or other programs, and they're thinking about, okay, this seems like a really exciting space. Maybe I want to follow your steps and become an entrepreneur, or maybe I want to work for a small company or maybe work for a large company. How do you advise them to figure out this space, to figure out what the landscape looks like, and how to plug in? What are the resources you point people to and so on?
Apoorv Bhargava:
I often get this question, I definitely love going back to MBA programs and having this conversation. First of all, I will say it's just amazing that the number of people I've seen in every MBA, leading MBA program around the country who are interested in climate and energy, it's just been astounding, and I'm so delighted to see that. Secondly, I'll maybe repeat something I said earlier, which is it's a rewriting of the global economy. We need people from all walks of life. Like this isn't a, oh, I only want to go work for a battery company. I only want to go work for a grid intelligence company. I only want to go work for a carbon removal company.
No, you're literally trying to do anything and everything, and there's going to be a role to be played as the climate changes and as every company has to respond to that change in climate and the risks that are associated with it. But I think thirdly, I'm a former consultant and an MBA, so I have lots of frameworks around this, but what I often advise is to think about the skills you bring today, whether it's functional skills, because you've worked in finance, you've worked in business development, you've worked in whatever. Think about those functional skills. Where could you go apply those functional skills for a company that needs them? If there isn't a company that excites you in the current market, do you have the risk appetite to go do it yourself? Would you want to go start your own company?
So, it's a combination of skills, risk tolerance, specific parts of the industry that are appetizing. Perhaps if there's no new industry or no industry type that's interesting, then think about old industries that need that innovation, and that drive, and that thinking about what a decarbonized future of themselves looks like. Thinking along the very first principle parameters of what is it that I want to do? And then, if I know what I want to do, then where can I go apply those skills? And I find that I hire people who have enterprise SaaS selling experiences. They've never worked at utilities, but they know how to sell. And so, I hire those people.
Most of my engineering team has never worked in the energy and utility space. They've worked at Twitter, Google, Meta, lots of fast-growing startups before that, other ones like it. That's the type of person that comes to WeaveGrid. And then, of course, yes, we have our experts from utilities, from automakers, all of those folks within the company who really bring that deep empathy for the companies that we work with and the systems and approaches that they take. Yeah, there's lots of avenues. The point is that every industry needs you, so just go find the thing that excites you and where you want to go spend the next five years of your life, then that's the really important thing.
Mike Toffel:
Great. Well, Apoorv, thank you so much for spending time with us here on Climate Rising. I've really enjoyed the conversation.
Apoorv Bhargava:
Likewise. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here.
Mike Toffel:
That was my conversation with Apoorv Bhargava, CEO and co-founder of WeaveGrid.
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