Do we need smart meters?

Music Jason Pontin: So, does the panel believe that smart grid and smart meters will see investment and will produce innovation in the next couple of years? Whoa! Alright, that's good. So, who, you kind of you're heading? Joe Schoendorf: Well, I'm absolutely convinced that we're going to reinvent the total grid. I'm less convinced about smart meters. I have built a home -- I'm building a home for a long time, a green home up in Saint Helena and I have measured this thing. I've got, I bought a three-phased powered meter and -- you know you got a smart meter and it tells you all the stuff and then the question is, so what? You know, I've realized I was burning twice the kilowatt hours I thought I was going to build and the only way I could go figured it out is to invest $2500 in the storage power meter and then I had to go put it on all of the major things in the house for 2 days while I run a normal cycle. Now, which person is going to do that? You know if we take the next step, which is to connect the device where it's powered in the home to the smart meter, so there can be a close loop and you can do something with the information. Today, we're hyping the smart meter so it will tell you a lot, but we haven't begun to think about the problem in terms of what the "so what?" is, that's why I went this way. Ram Shriram: The smart meter is connected to a mesh network that's where -- you know it makes sense, because then you could turn on and off devices and use them -- the high powered devices you use when -- you know it does not... Joe Schoendorf: It does not gets in to home automation... Ram Shriram: Yeah. Right. Joe Schoendorf: In all of things we were failing up for twenty years? Ram Shriram: Right -- no, but it... Joe Schoendorf: Brought to you, brought to you... Ram Shriram: But it also gets into networking that we know well for a long time. Joe Schoendorf: Brought to you by PG&E, who is one step below the post office and the telephone company as a goods supplier, so... Jason Pontin: Steve? Steve Jurvetson: Well, I'm not a big enthusiast of the smart meter in the home today, but they are nevertheless, when you look at the general area of power and efficiency management services it's undeniable there's an insane amount of waste going on in the grid, in data centers and all up and down the stack. And to be able to remotely manage resources that are left on for peak needs and so data centers left on all the time it only uses -- you know less than 20% of the time. That's an enormous amount of waste, overall. The companies like EnerNOC, I think they're paving the way and showing what can be done. This is a company we first invested in a few years ago and it now has already prevented 60 power plants from being produced. What they do is just aggregate these little gen sets, refrigerators, stuff that are in industry, right. It's not in the consumer's home, but places where you can dim the lights, where you can turn them off at night. When you can say look users, can we have some control in the central way over the data network of all of your both generating capacity and your usage. And if we have a peak need, instead of having a brownout or building a power plant we only need for a few hours each year, we will be able to battle things back. And in so doing this, you know already signed up of 3-Gigawatts of synthesized capacity that now the grid otherwise doesn't need in its distributed capacity. And so that's just one of many examples that are coming down the pipe. We have about four different companies working in this area both in the U.S. and China, where they say they can make a watt not spent the best watt you've ever conserved. Ann Winblad: There is said about odd statement in this trend here saying, start-ups did well because they got 317 million in DC funding, that's not how we judge whether the start-ups did well as how much funding they got. Steve Jurvetson: That's true. Ann Winblad: I do want to clarify that. Steve Jurvetson: That is true. Ann Winblad: You know, I think what we're saying here is that it's a sufficiently hard and interesting and has a provable result in the end for those that make it work. I'm not sure that pouring 11 billion more dollars on it accelerates the pace of innovation here, but it's going to be a problem set that is again you know is there an addressable market, are there customers that really want to see cost savings here and improvement -- definitely, and they're everywhere from us as consumers to the enterprises themselves. Is it a sufficiently interesting problem that's addressable with reasonable amounts of capital, cut out that 11 billion to build some significant companies here - likely, and I think that's why we're supporting it as a trend. I don't think it's easy. So, I do think that out of those companies who got the 317 million in 2008 that some of that is lost money.

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