The unveiling of GE’s new $200 million ecomagination innovation challenge and two smart-grid product launches grabbed the spotlight during yesterday’s clean-tech conference in San Francisco. But attendees also focused on one of the other critical elements — scale, and why it’s so important when trying to get new technologies adopted, especially in a mass, global market. As Ray Lane, Managing Partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — one of the four venture capital firms in the new challenge fund — said during a panel discussion: “There’s 120 million residences, 20 million businesses, 3,300 utilities… and there’s another 1,500 independent power producers that all have to move in sync to solve this [energy and grid] problem. It is a scale problem and it is very difficult [for entrepreneurs] to think about new technology that you can demonstrate and then say, ‘now I’ve got a bigger problem: how do I scale it up?’”The unveiling of GE’s new $200 million ecomagination innovation challenge and two smart-grid product launches grabbed the spotlight during yesterday’s clean-tech conference in San Francisco. But attendees also focused on one of the other critical elements — scale, and why it’s so important when trying to get new technologies adopted, especially in a mass, global market. As Ray Lane, Managing Partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — one of the four venture capital firms in the new challenge fund — said during a panel discussion: “There’s 120 million residences, 20 million businesses, 3,300 utilities… and there’s another 1,500 independent power producers that all have to move in sync to solve this [energy and grid] problem. It is a scale problem and it is very difficult [for entrepreneurs] to think about new technology that you can demonstrate and then say, ‘now I’ve got a bigger problem: how do I scale it up?’”
 Meet WattStation: As Forbes said of the new Yves Behar-designed WattStation that was introduced at the conference: “General Electric Chief Executive Jeff Immelt unveiled perhaps the best-looking electric vehicle charger yet invented,” adding that it’s “an electric charging station that could double as a piece of art.” Tech blog engadget called it “beautifully engineered” and said of Behar: “When that man designs something, we take notice.” In case you’re wondering, WattStation has a place to swipe a credit card on the bottom of its screen. Currently a full charge for a 24kWh battery would cost about $3.50-4.00 based on average electricity rates. |
“There’s no lack of innovation,” Ray continued in the discussion. “The question is one of opportunity — whether you can identify the innovation and can actually bring it to life. Like I say, we [venture capital firms] are overwhelmed with the number of entrepreneurs who want to attack this problem… You could actually apply pretty elementary technologies [to the grid] and reap benefits. It’s such a one-way, pretty dumb system that we just kind of spin energy out there to match peak demand and everything else is wasted. There’s no lack of entrepreneurship or technology to bring to bear, but many times our entrepreneurs run into scale issues. They don’t know how to scale this to the type of complexity…. But I’m sure there are ideas out there and companies — certainly research labs and universities — today where we haven’t seen the idea yet. If you take the creativity that exists in the VC community and you combine it with the commercial scale and the research capability that exists in GE, good things will happen.”
Added GE CMO Beth Comstock in the video interview with TechCrunch below: “We’re a big company. We’ve got lots of sales people and lots of technologists — about 50,000 sales people, about 50,000 technologists. We live to invent and get to market. Maybe we want to acquire a good idea. Maybe we just want to license a good idea by putting it under the GE brand. But what we’re commiting to is investing in an idea and getting it to market quickly.”
Another topic that sparked interest was the idea of not just talking about the smart grid, but rather the concept of “digital energy.” In 2009 the digital energy market — which covers everything from data collection to grid optimization and automation — was estimated to be about $18 billion. However, it’s expected to explode to about $110 billion in size by 2030. When asked why the term is now so central to GE’s thinking, Beth told TechCrunch: “It’s not just about the grid. It’s about digitizing energy. It’s about making energy more efficient to make, to transport and to use. And so there are a number of different factors and I think the translation is very good for consumers, who’ve seen what digitization and what the Internet has done for their lives. And if you think about that now happening in an energy sense, hopefully it’s exciting, empowering and gives us much more potential and opportunity.”
Also in the spotlight at GE’s clean-tech showcase were a slew of ecomagination products, ranging from the new Leap X jet engine — the first version of which will be powering China’s new C919 passgenger jet — to the residential scale wind turbines made by Southwest Windpower, in which GE is an investment partner. Steve Fludder, vice president of GE ecomagination, gives an overview in the video below.
* Read “Unveiled: $200M challenge, EV charger, smart monitor” on GE Reports
* Watch a replay of the webcast
* Watch CNBC’s interview with Jeff Immelt following the announcement
* Read the WattStation announcement
* Read the ecomagination Challenge announcement
* Read the Nucleus announcement
* Learn more about GE WattStation, including preorder details
* Visit the challenge website
* Visit ecomagination.com
* Read more ecomagination stories on GE Reports
* Read the just-released ecomagination Annual Report
