December 12, 2011

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Green Energy Corp, creator of the GreenBus open-source software intended to allow interoperability among disparate grid-related data, is seeking up to $10 million in private funding, founder and CTO Peter Gregory told us in an exclusive interview last week.  The money, which his firm is seeking through a private-placement memo, will go toward expanding sales and marketing efforts into the firm's four most likely market segments, he said.

          “How much of each segment we'll capture, and at what rate, is something I don't want to discuss with the memo outstanding,” Gregory said.  “But each segment -- large utilities, co-ops, emerging nations and microgrids in developed nations -- could represent billions of dollars” in revenue.  “I'm seeing a huge push toward microgrids, from co-ops and independent power producers,” he said.  “This is a very, very key segment that will explode over the next 10 years to be as big as any of the others.”

          Green Energy, based in Denver, released GreenBus in January, touting it as software that allows data-sharing among programs from multiple vendors that were never intended to cooperate (SGT, Jan-13).  For example, a SCADA system from one vendor might note that a trunk line is not receiving power, but it previously could not send that data to another vendor's outage-management system to dispatch alerts and suggest fixes.  If both vendors modified their programs to conform to GreenBus, and if the utility were running GreenBus, then such connectivity could exist.

          Utilities might want to share information about:  AMI and MDMS programs; asset- and facilities-management programs; DA; energy-management systems, which manage generation and distribution, and engineering-and-maintenance programs.

          Following the open-source model pioneered by Linux software firm Red Hat, Green Energy has created a “community” of independent and corporate software developers, utilities and other organizations that write software and contribute it to a pool it maintains, Gregory said. 

Anyone can use any of the software at no charge. Green Energy makes its money by packaging the pieces of the software appropriate for a given customer, ensuring they work well together and maintaining and upgrading the resulting system as necessary.  Rather than charging a licensing fee, as conventional software vendors do, Green Energy charges a subscription fee.

          “To package software like that takes tremendous expertise, which is why customers come to us,” he said.

          So far, Green Energy has focused mostly on getting exposure.  The only utility the firm has said is using GreenBus is Piedmont Electric Membership Corp, of Hillsborough, NC.  The firm announced that deal in February (SGT, Feb-02).

An unnamed “large international utility” is in “pre-production” with GreenBus, Roxy Podlogar, VP of product strategy, told us this week. 

“Several” deployments are in the development and evaluation phase with “large and small smart grid vendors, both international and domestic,” she said.  An unnamed microgrid developer chose GreenBus as its core technology, for deployment in next year's second quarter.  And negotiations are under way with an unnamed co-op of 22,000 meters, she said.

          Gregory declined to state the firm's total capitalization and its 2010 revenue and net income.  All investors to date have been private individuals, many of them employees, friends and family.  Green Energy has about 80 full-time employees.  Most reside in Colorado.  About 10 are located in Raleigh, NC.

          Though sales may have been few, exposure has been plentiful.

In January, the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management Systems Center engineering research center at North Carolina State University, funded by the National Science Foundation, chose GreenBus to demonstrate technology it will develop.  “We were selected after strong competition,” Gregory said.

          In September, KEMA chose GreenBus to promote interoperability in its new testing lab (SGT, Sep-02).  Again, “we were up against the big guys” in the selection process for that affiliation, Gregory said.

          And NRECA has “endorsed” GreenBus, which could lead to revenue, he said. 

QUOTABLE:  We work with utilities and sign
them up in a collective way, compared with working
with one utility at a time.  It's an aggregation play.

Green Energy Corp founder and
CTO Peter Gregory

          Internationally, the Haitian government chose Green Energy to provide grid-management software (SGT, Dec-29).  The firm has completed the specifications, and Haiti's secretaries of energy and state have approved its approach, Gregory told us this week, though nothing has been implemented yet.

          No firm is trying to compete directly with Green Power, Gregory insisted.  Firms including Comverge, EMeter, EnerNOC, Grid Point and Silver Spring Networks deal with data passing between the utility and the consumer, but “they bypass working directly with grid operations, because it's mission critical -- a very scary business to be in,” he said.

                Likely competitors ‘very proprietary'

ABB, GE and Siemens do swim in those dangerous waters.  But they produce software that “was designed and developed many years ago,” Gregory said.  “They don't support scalability or renewables.  They're very proprietary.”

          That word is anathema to Green Energy. 

Of course, “proprietary” has long been a common epithet to hurl at competitors.

Yet there is a certain comfort in proprietary software.  It may be one-off, but it is your firm's one-off, and utilities may find more virtue in knowing that software is going to work than having openness, the freedom to mix, match and adapt software.

          Gregory acknowledged that sentiment, only to dismiss it.

“That needs to change,” he said.  “That may have been OK before the smart grid, but the new level of security required, the highly distributed generation and load, in the form of EVs -- the systems running the grid to date can't run those.” 

And, he added, proprietary software is unlikely to scale enough to manage ballooning data volume that has come to characterize the smart grid. Smart meters sending data every 15 minutes generate 700 times more data than electromechanical meters read once a month (SGT, Nov-29).

          Linux open-source superstar Red Hat has contributed operating-system software and two kinds of messaging software to Green Energy's community effort, Gregory said.  GreenBus “has very strong Red Hat component,” he said. 

Red Hat did not return a call seeking comment last week.

          Green Energy is following a strategy to absorb any competitors that might emerge.

“Supporting an open-source movement is a better idea than doing another [competing open-source effort] in parallel,” Gregory said.  “We can play with everyone.  We can integrate a vendor's software so it has a better [sales] channel.”