Want to Use More Renewable Energy? See This Month’s Webinar

I hope you can make this month’s webinar, in which we’ll be covering a terrific new idea that could make a real difference in the integration of renewables onto the grid-mix.

Electrons, of course, have no color, nor do they possess any other characteristic that could serve to distinguish any one of them from their fellows. But that doesn’t stop us humans from coining phrases like “the color of the electron,” to remind ourselves that some sources of the flow of electrons on which we depend so desperately for our energy can be “green” (i.e., clean/renewable), or they can be “black” or “brown” (dirty coal or other fossil fuels).

Now, ask yourself: What would be the result if we could select the color of the electrons that powered our lives? What if we knew the time of day, for example, at which the grid mix most favored solar and wind, and said, “OK, I’ll delay (or accelerate) washing my clothes (or charging my car, or whatever) an hour or two, so as to buy more “green electrons.”

Enter a company called GridMobility, with a set of domestic and international patents around a really cool piece of software.  CEO Dr. Jim Holbery sat me down the other day and explained how GridMobility enables a consumer or a business to go online, to enter a zip code, and to see the optimum time to consume the power demanded for the day, based on location, the weather forecast, normal seasonable variations, and the nature and size of the user’s own demand.

Obviously, the effects – whatever they may be – of the huge industrial power consumers dwarf those of individual homeowners. Take a huge corporate campus, for example, that chills millions of square feet of office space every day using cold water. The effects of their decision to shift the time at which they chill that water by an hour or two has quite a significant effect on the grid.

But let’s think about this. Suppose I elect to use GridMobility to buy the energy I need that day at a certain time, and that this decision enables me to buy relatively greener energy. All this really means is that someone else is getting relatively dirty energy; I haven’t changed the actual grid-mix overall.

Or have I? What happens when a statistically significant number of parties begin to program their energy consumption around the availability of renewables? Utilities can plan, to an ever-increasing degree, to buy energy from renewable resources, bringing more and more clean energy into the grid-mix.

Please join us for this month’s webinar, when Jim Holbery will be my guest.  Why not put it on your calendar right now?  It’s Thursday, September 29th, at 10 AM PDT (1 PM EDT). I hope to be fielding your questions and comments.