Podcast #15: Analytics, IT & People will power Transformative Change

Hello everyone, this is Ed Maguire, Insights Partner at Momenta Partners with another episode of our Edge Podcast, and today we’re thrilled to have with us Dr. Chandu Visweswariah who is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Utopus Insights. He led this company to $100 million acquisition by Vestas Wind Systems which was spun out of IBM, just 11 months after the spin out it was acquired by Vestas. 

Chandu has an amazingly accomplished career, he was previously leading the World-Wide Smarter Energy Environmental Science team at IBM, he was named a Fellow in 2013 which the highest technical honor at IBM, one of only 92 IBM fellows out of over 400,000 people there. Before this he was a distinguished engineer in electronic design automation in the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, where he led the team responsible for correct signal timing in all of the IMB chips.  

In terms of his background he joined IBM in 1989 after getting his PhD in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, he’s been a visiting faculty member at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, named innovator of the year by EDN magazine in 2006. He’s had numerous IBM corporate awards, he’s a fellow of the IEEE, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, master innovator, over 100 publications and he’s also a great guy. 

So, Chandu, it’s great to have you on the podcast. 

Thank you Ed and I appreciate that introduction very much. 

Could you provide a bit of context about what has shaped your views of technology, and the energy markets in particular, because that’s been the area you’ve been most focused on over the last several years. 

Certainly Ed, I spent 28 years of my professional life involved in chip design in the micro-electronics field, and as you know, that is a domain largely governed by Moore’s law. Moore’s law is largely a law of economics, it tells us the rate and pace at which you can manufacture circuits less-expensively year over year. I was involved in about ten generations of technology from 250 nanometer feature sizes down to 10 nanometer feature sizes, that taught me a lot about trends and how economics are pretty much the only type of forces that bring about large-scale technology adoption. 

Now that I’m in the energy space I see very similar trends, we have some pretty steep cost-curves that are ongoing with the levelized cost of energy from wind farms and solar farms rapidly reducing, and just a little bit behind that in time we’re starting to see cost-curves in terms of battery storage as well. So, energy is a very large domain, its fundamental to our way of life, it is lean disrupted by similar cost-curves and economic forces as we had in micro-electronics over the last 30-years, but in some ways is very-very unique. It’s partially regulated space with a patchwork of regulations in different parts of the world, energy is a product that for the most part cannot be stored, electricity at least gets used the instant it gets produced. It’s also at the heart of an environmental imperative to reduce carbon in our way of life. 

So, it’s all about economics and cost-curves, at the end of the day that’s what causes mass adoption and huge shifts in technology, so it behooves us to read these tealeaves, predict out to the future, and get ready for it. 

When you were first getting deep into energy on a personal level, you shared that you’d had some experience in building a carbon-neutral home. What was that like, and what did you learn from that experience? 

Well, that was one of the best learning experiences of my life. In the year 2008, my wife and I decided to build a house in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, not too far from the IBM laboratory. I decided it would be a carbon-neutral home, and so we put panels on the roof, we used heat pumps instead of a furnace, we invested in good insulation and efficient appliances, and so-on. It was a huge learning experience for me, and in fact right now we are going through the process of adding additional solar panels as we electrify our transportation as well. 

But I learnt a few important things from this house project, and in fact I was bitten and smitten by the energy bug after building this house, and it changed the arc of my career as you know. One of the things I learned is you need additional capital to build a carbon-neutral home, you have to invest in things like heat pumps, solar panels, and so-on, but there is a payback and you do get your money back over time. I also learned that defecting from the grid is not a very practical option, you need to vastly oversize your solar panels and add batteries, if you’re going to defect from the grid. Therefore, the interaction with the grid turned out to be a key part of building a carbon-neutral home, and that was an interesting learning experience as well. 

But ultimately it led me to the question, if I can go carbon-neutral, what would it take for the rest of the world to achieve that as well? That thought ended up changing my career and changing the direction of my subsequent work. 

How did that lead to the creation of the Smarter Energy Group you were leading at IBM? Did you look at the energy markets and see opportunities there? 

Yes, absolutely. Once we built our house, energy was a hobby at that time, I was reading everything I could get my hands on, and the more I read about it the more I felt that it was a space which was ready for some massive disruption, and a very-very interesting space for me to get involved. So, within IBM I decided to make a change, I was working at IBM Fishkill at the time where all the micro-electronic devices are fabricated, I petitioned IBM to go back to IBM Research and started to run a Smarter Energy Team in IBM, a fledgling team. The goal there was to work with energy companies and utilities, and in partnership with them, co-innovate, and what we were focusing on was energy analytics, the use of digital techniques to help and to accelerate the transition that was ongoing in the energy space. The Smarter Energy Team grew in size and in importance, and at some point, as you explained in the introduction, we spun-out of IBM as an independent company, as a start-up, to build on the energy analytics vision. 

You alluded earlier to how the energy markets are different from say the traditional customers for information technology. As you started looking at this market, which again whenever you develop a technology there needs to be a customer use case, but could you characterize what you saw of the opportunity in the markets, and some of the dynamics there, and how has that evolved over the past several years? 

When you look at the energy domain in a broader sense, it includes transportation and building, cooling, and heating, it is an enormous world-wide market of the order of about $5 trillion annually. This entire domain was, in my mind, increasingly decarbonized, decentralized, and digitized, the three big-D’s. Decarbonized as an environmental imperative, and in response to the afore-mentioned cost-curves with wind and solar energy getting cheaper year over year. Decentralized in that we’re moving away from large centralized power plants like nuclear and coal plants, and instead you’re going to have a solar farm here, a wind farm there, battery bank in the neighborhood, much more decentralized than before, and digitized, and this was where my main interest was in applying energy analytics to help this transformation with digital solutions. 

So, let’s talk for a moment about the digitization of the energy system. The energy system we have consists of all kinds of equipment that is increasingly instrumented, intelligent, and inter-connected. So, our wind turbines or our sub-stations increasingly have instrumentation that feed a torrent of data to us. In addition, we have exogenous or external data like weather, vegetation, social media data, that can also be helpful in orchestrating this whole energy system. Add to that ubiquitous hardware that is increasingly inexpensive, add to that the advent of cloud computing, add to that the big data analytics, techniques, and breakthroughs we’ve had in the last decade, and you get a powder keg that really is capable of exploding and creating tremendous value for the energy market.  

So, at the heart of some of these seismic paradigm shifts that we’re seeing in the energy space, it is really the adoption of clean energy. When we talk about clean energy, it seems inevitable to me that we’re on a journey to achieving 100 percent clean energy for all of our energy needs. But that means in turn that we are dependent on for the most part wind and solar energy, and therefore we’re at the mercy of the clouds, the winds, and the sun, to get all of our energy. So, one of the grand challenges we have is to deal with this varying, or intermittent supply of energy, and I would argue that digitization has an extremely key role to play in solving this grand challenge. 

There’s no doubt Chandu, I think we’re very much on the same page in that view of the advent, and potential ability for clean energy, essentially to displace most of the carbon-based fuels. The first couple of podcast guests we had included Tony Seba from ReThinkX, and Nick Gogerty who founded SolarCoin, and when you start looking at these cost-curves they really are quite compelling. But in contrast to pure cloud computing where you’re really dealing with the declining cost of processing and storage, and maybe you’ll throw in the availability of cheaper bandwidth for your traditional, as we like to think of, Connected Industry or industrial IoT solutions in other areas like manufacturing. Energy does have some unique technology challenges, could you talk about some of the hurdles or obstacles, and unique dimensions that are involved when you start applying information technology to clean energy. 

Absolutely Ed, and you’re correct in saying that the energy space is unique and poses some unique challenges. As I said before, I think we’re on our way to creating a whole new operating system of energy, if you will. I believe we need to think of a future in which when the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing, and energy is abundant, I will charge your car, and I will pre-heat your home, and I will charge batteries. And when energy is not abundant, we will discharge batteries and postpone the charging of your car. And when there’s congestion problems, we will get ancillary services from wind and solar farms instead of just getting kilowatt hours. So, we need this real-time component.  

When you look at the progress of IoT, or the Internet of Things in various domains, it’s often about maintaining assets better, or saving money in some manner, and all of those apply to energy. But in the case of energy, digitization can do so much more, it can be at the heart of what keeps the system up and running, stable and reliable, inexpensive and clean, and these are exactly the attributes we want out of our future energy systems. I would posit that what we need going forward is a new kind of digital platform, it’s a platform that needs to be both broad and deep; its broad in the sense that it spans the gamut from generation, all the way to the grid edge and beyond, and its deep in the sense that it supports many kinds of analytics.  

In our company Utopus Insights we are building four families of analytics on a common platform, everything from descriptive analytics where you get situational awareness and dashboarding, to predictive analytics where you predict what’s going to happen in the future, to prescriptive analytics where you prescribe what needs to happen in order to use your equipment better, or maintain it better, all the way to real-time analytics where you’re balancing the grid in real-time, using all of this data that’s available.  

You need a platform that understands weather, and weather forecasting very well. You need a platform that can deal with huge amounts of data, and keep it secure, and keep it organized in a common data model. You need a platform that can deal with uncertainty and optimize for future outcomes in the face of uncertainty. This is the kind of push we need on digital tools to solve this grand challenge that we were talking about.  

I would like to talk a little more about the challenges of using the cloud, but we’ll perhaps get to that a little bit later. 

Sure. I wanted to follow up a bit on the discussion of the platform work you’re doing. Energy itself has many dimensions to the assets and processes that are involved. Could you talk a bit about some of the, what I’ll call applications, that you focused on? For instance, when you’re dealing with physical assets like solar panels and wind turbines, you have maintenance but also optimization challenges; you want to maximize the amount of energy that you deliver from those assets and improve RLI. But on the flip-side there’s also the transmission and distribution element which is, how do you get the power from where its generated, to ultimately where its consumed, and being able to maintain those assets at a very high degree of availability? It’s a lot different than trying to ensure an email gets to somebody at the other end of an email server. 

Could you talk about some of the optimization and process improvement applications you have focused on across those spectrums of assets? 

Ed, I think we’re onto a very-very important point here. As we integrate more of this clean energy into our system, it’s one thing if you have 5 percent or 10 percent renewable energy in your system. As it gets to a higher level of penetration, we need to look beyond the fence of the wind farm or the solar farm, to make sure all of that energy gets integrated into the grid properly. So, we need to worry about transmission distribution, power quality, frequency support, voltage support, and so-on, and so the paradigm is shifting from simply maximizing the number of kilowatt hours that you’re able to sell, to, maximizing the value that you can provide to the grid, which is a subtly different thing. 

The second thing we see happening is, some of the subsidies that occurred in the early part of the renewable revolution are starting to either diminish or go away; things like power purchase agreements and production tax credits or PTCs, are starting to phase out. As this happens, first of all there’s even more of an emphasis on reducing the levelized cost of energy, or LCOE, and using every trick available at your disposal to improve the economics. But secondly, if you do not have a power purchase agreement for a solar farm or a wind farm, then you’re competing on the open market for energy, just as a coal plant or a nuclear plant would. At this time, it’s important for us to recognize that although these renewable sources of energy are intermittent, it’s not as though they are unpredictable. They are predictable, and advanced analytics techniques can be used to produce accurate forecasts, and therefore bid that energy more effectively, reduce costs for the whole system, make sure that energy does not get curtailed because of congestion or other problems, and provide maximum value from the solar farms and wind farms. 

Therefore, I agree with you that the challenge in the case of energy has its own twist, it’s not simply better maintenance, or better use of IoT data, it’s this real-time component and it’s this predictive component where you look into the future and optimize what you’re going to do. Even within a single windfarm for example, there’s tremendous work we can do to minimize the wake from one turbine to another, optimize the tail spin, the pitch, and the yar of each turbine to produce the maximum amount of energy. Combine this with our maintenance schedules so that we take turbines down only during a low-wind period, or when we do take a turbine down we change the way we control the surrounding turbines to get more energy. 

The number of used cases, the sky’s the limit in terms of applying these kinds of techniques. 

That’s amazing because the application of analytics particularly around just pure operational optimization has become so critical, because there’s no input cost for wind or the sun, it really is purely a capital cost, so analytics plays such a critical role here in being able to drive more value from all these assets. 

There’s another aspect which I think is also very important, and somewhat unique to the energy market, which is the nature of the customers, the utilities, and dealing with the requirements, local requirements, regulatory mandates etc., as well as the characteristics of the organizational culture in the customers. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced certainly as a start-up, you went outside of IBM for a long-time, but you dealt with a lot of early projects. What are some of the characteristics of successful projects? 

I’ll just point out that when we talk about the energy space, there’s a regulated portion of it which is typically transmission and distribution, and there’s an unregulated side of it as well, which is typically both the generation portion at one end of the spectrum, and the customer service portion at the other end of the spectrum. There’s a lot of challenges working in the energy space, the regulatory framework tends to make utilities slow moving and conservative, and not prone to taking risks or encouraging innovation, but with notable examples of utilities that have been able to make some tremendous progress, despite the regulatory environment. 

We have business models that are in my mind stopping us from making progress as fast as we need to, we have low RND investment, we have technical challenges to make progress in this space I’ve been describing, you need skills in meteorology, you need skills in cloud computing, you need skills in deep data science, you need skills in power engineering and renewable energy science; that’s a pretty darn thing set of skills to assemble, to tackle the kinds of problems that we’re talking about. We also have an energy system that is very much siloed, even if you look within the electricity system we have generation, we have ISOs that typically run the market for energy and keep the reliability going, these are independent system operators. Then you have transmission, then distribution, then grid-edge, and then you have companies that work behind the meter, like optimizing your building’s energy management for example. 

These siloes need to break down, at least to the extent that the individual siloes start to exchange information on a real-time basis. So, the divisions between these silos need to get broken down to some extent, in order for this grand vision to become a reality. We also need to as an entire energy industry, start to think of data differently, data is gold, data is valuable, and a lot of people think of it as a pain, its inconsistent, its dirty, its incomplete, some censors have gone bad, it’s just hogging space on some disc, there’s no proper governance of it; we need to change our mind and get very purposeful, and systematic about how we collect, curate, organize, and use this data. 

Finally, as long as we’re talking about challenges, let me talk about cloud. We’ve seen at least in consumer computing the advent of cloud completely changing a number of different industries. You see what Uber has done to transportation, you see what Airbnb has done to hospitality, it’s really cloud computing that has enabled these massive shifts, and this is inevitable, it’s going to happen in energy as well. However, there are some important factors that are impeding our progress.  

Firstly, most utilities like to capitalise their software investments, and various arcane accounting rules keep them from capitalizing their cloud investment. 

Secondly, a lot of energy companies are afraid their data will not be safe in the cloud, and whilst it’s a legitimate fear, many of them don’t realize it could perhaps be safer in the cloud if implemented properly than if it’s done on premises, which is subject to hacking and security breaches as well.  

Thirdly, cloud gives us a way to quickly, nimbly, in an agile manner try new ideas, try new solutions, and see if they work or not. This industry however suffers from death by pilotitis; we do pilots all the time, they need to be free, they get implemented on premises which takes a lot of cost and is not very agile, and in the meanwhile the most innovative software vendor companies are unable to survive, because of the very long sales cycles and huge pilots that we have to do. Cloud is a perfect solution to that problem as well. 

So, just to summarize; there’s a lot of challenges, regulatory challenges, accounting challenges, business models, low RND investment, building multidisciplinary challenges, breaking down silos, treating data with respect, getting cloud solutions to be adopted. But in some sense, that’s what makes all of this fun. 

It is when you untangle the giant ball of string as it were, or the big spaghetti tangle! You do find gems of value.  

You made a couple of references to the regulatory environment, and I know you’ve had the opportunity to speak with government leaders from time to time. I’d love to get your perspective on how different governments are looking at the challenges of making this transition from existing legacy energy to clean energy; what are some of the things that governments can do in a constructive way beyond subsidies, which as you mentioned are going to be going away, because whilst economically they may not be as necessary, but are there some constructive steps or programs that maybe you’ve seen or you think could be implemented, which would really help this process of transition along? 

Great question, and you’re right. I’ve been speaking to state legislators, and in fact in a couple of weeks I’ll be speaking to the National Governor’s Association, and there is a lot that the government can do, both in terms of policy and in terms of programs to encourage progress in this space. To me it’s a race against time, we have an environmental imperative, carbon in the atmosphere went up by two parts per million just in the last year alone, and we simply cannot afford for this to continue. So, there’s a timeliness that we all need to feel the sense of urgency to do things faster and move it in a sensible direction. 

Speaking of subsidies, if at all we use subsidies they need to be sensible subsidies, and there are many subsidies designs today whereby the amount of subsidy automatically reduces as adoption rises. So, there’s a whole school of thought on how subsidies should be designed in order to incent the right kind of behavior for what we’re trying to achieve. So, even in the area of subsidy there’s a lot more that can be done. Secondly, there’s the whole regulatory framework and the business models that we use. At its heart the electricity system is something whereby we charge people per kilowatt hour, and we use that not only to generate the energy, but also to transmit the energy in, to maintain the grid and so-on.  

Now, here we are in a situation where there are people with solar panels that are not using kilowatt hours, so should they not pay for the grid? Well, as I said in my opening, they are dependent on the grid and should pay for it. So, this aggregating the bill whereby you pay separately for energy versus upkeep of the grid, I think is important in order to incent the right behavior, and that is but one example of changing business models. 

Another is a kilowatt that is saved is what they call a negawatt, or a negative watt, is the most valuable, and so energy efficiency is something we should all be emphasizing, however, we’re telling utilities you get to make money by selling kilowatt hours, please sell fewer kilowatt hours. So, there are so many perversities in our policies and our business models, and as much as government can help us get those out of there and allow innovation and markets to just run at full steam ahead, I think it would be super-helpful.  

In terms of examples, we have been working for over five years with VELCO, Vermont Electric Power Company, and the entire Vermont system of 17 distribution utilities who are the collective owners of VELCO, and in addition part of that collaboration has included ISO New England, which is the Independent System Operator for five New England states. In terms of breaking down silos, working across ISO transmission and distribution to achieve some of our goals, in terms of working with forward leaning utilities that are willing to adopt cloud solutions, that are willing to be agile, nimble, and try new ideas, I think this is just a great story in terms of how we can make great progress and apply innovations in a very practical manner. So, as I list all these problems, I don’t want you to feel that this is an impossible hurdle, I think there are some fabulous examples of where we’ve been able to make tremendous progress. 

Not at all. I think the VELCO example you cited is an amazing case of a unique organization, or cooperative, that was able to save an enormous amount of money, and the dimensions you mentioned of the economic model for utilities I think are challenging, because essentially to increase revenues you have to sell more kilowatt hours, and of course there are price bands that mandate rates. But reducing costs on the flip side is also an enormous challenge for utilities that have assets which are spread all over, and certainly minimizing the impact of extreme weather events which we’ve had a couple of them here in my neighborhood; we lost power from an ice-storm in March, and that is not trivial. 

When you look at utilities, how should they think about this coming transition in the modes of generation, and even thinking about how the model changes from being transmission and distribution, or maybe more of a hub and spoke, to potentially even more of a distributed model? Are there arguments or ROI cases that you think will be particularly compelling for existing utilities to jump on this train, and be a bit more visionary, than some of the laggards, compared to VELCO who you mentioned, and who is very much at the cutting edge? 

Yes, there’s many examples. You see what happened recently in Brooklyn where they were able to use distributed energy resources to reduce investment in a whole new substation. You look at the blockchain-based trading that’s been started in Brooklyn. You look at some non-transmission alternatives that are being considered all over the country, but particularly in Vermont; building more transmission is not always the best solution to problems. You look at the effort in New York, and everything that’s going on in California; so yes, there are many examples of initiatives towards this new energy future.  

Any time you talk about the future you have to talk about the millennials and Gen-Z, because this is for whom we’re building the future. They want to use cloud computing, they want answers to everything on their mobile devices, they fully understand the power of digital solutions, they want the transition to clean energy to happen faster, and we need to do it for them, and we need to feel the urgency to make it happen. Whatever it is that’s standing in the way, whether it’s a technology hurdle, and accounting hurdle, a regulatory or policy hurdle, a business model hurdle, it behooves us to sit down and solve these issues and work together to make that happen. There are enough great examples of that happening in the world for us to emulate. 

It's really encouraging, and I think the point you make about millennials is spot-on, it’s certainly a generation that’s got much more of a focus on doing well, by doing good, and this generational shift, I’m very optimistic about the acceleration of this transition. 

How do you see the market evolving over the next decade? If you put on your futurist goggles, could you paint us a picture or scenario of what life will be like in the energy world a decade out, as these forces continue to unfold, and the technologies that you’re developing really start to reach full fruition? 

Certainly. It’s very-very dangerous to try to predict the future, but… 

I’m not going hold you to it! We could check back in a decade and see how well things turn out! 

The one thing I can guarantee is my predictions will be wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile exercise to make predictions, so let me go ahead and try to do that. Let me just throw out a bunch of things that I think are going to change, and then I’ll try to pull them together into a system kind of view. 

One thing that’s going to change is that wind and solar energy are going to continue on that cost-curve, and absolutely everywhere in the world they will be the cheapest form of energy, least expensive, and therefore economics makes a giant sucking sound, and nobody will build these coal plants anymore.  

Secondly, off-shore wind which today is more like $50 per megawatt hour is going to come down in cost because of both technology and, better construction practices. So, the turbines are getting bigger, and once we’re able to have floating turbines they could be installed pretty much anywhere on 2/3rds of this planet, provided you have some wiring back to shore. I think the cost-curve there is going to be steep and provide us with tremendous amounts of electricity along the seaboards of many countries, and in the United States of course we’re blessed with a shallow continental shelf all the way across the eastern seaboards. So that’s something that will take off. 

Thirdly, we will have very clearly an electrification of transportation which is now in its infancy, but you see all of the announcements by auto-manufacturers, by various countries, this is inevitable and as we do so, we have an additional source of flexibility in our demand, because you don’t have to charge a car as soon as it gets plugged in, it could be charged in the middle of the night for example, or in the middle of the day while you’re at work. 

Next, we’re going to see tremendous adoption of heat pumps, they are four-times more efficient than a traditional furnace, and so all of our heating and cooling will move to heat pumps, thereby giving us another degree of flexibility in our loads. We are going to see a tremendous increase in efficiency, the amount of energy we waste today, and the amount of assets that we put in the ground, and the low utilization we get from it, these will improve dramatically going forward. We are all going to have energy apps on our phones which determine how our thermostats work and determine when our cars get charged, and whether we are willing to pay a higher price and get the ultimate comfort, or we’re willing to make a one-degree sacrifice in comfort, which we can hardly feel, but that gives the utility tremendous amounts of flexibility to balance the grid. Whether we allow a peek into our calendar to determine how much we’re going to drive the next day and optimize the amount of charging of our cars which happens overnight, if there’s a peak usage that night, and so-on.  

We will all be completely at peace with these kinds of apps. There are those who will want to fiddle with it more, and there are those who will just pick a setting and let it be. 

Most importantly, we’ve got a carbon-curve we’re trying to limit to 2°C, that’s a Paris Accord, we’re trying to see at what parts per million we can stop that increase and get the curve to bend over. I want to see in my lifetime enough progress in that curve stops moving upwards, and are we going to get there? I don’t know, but the energy landscape will be unrecognizable 10 years from now, because of all the things I’ve said.  

So, a lot of emphasis on electrification, a lot of emphasis on efficiency, much better business models in terms of use of energy versus use of the grid, and a much-much higher level of digitization. 

It’s just stunning how much change is possible and stands right in front of us. In my conversation with Tony Seba, he did put a stake in the ground and said 2021 is going to be the year where we start to see transportation as a service based on electric vehicles really hit an inflection point. He’s been pretty spot-on for the last several years in his cost-curve, so I’m pretty optimistic about that.  

I think you and I are very much on the same page in terms of our views of where the market’s going, but there are still some sceptics out there, and a lot of folks who just don’t really see beyond the existing modes of gas extraction, and oil. There are a lot of sceptics that have some… not arguing that they aren’t valid objections, but when you hear sceptics what do you think people may be missing if they don’t fully appreciate the magnitude of this transformation that’s ahead of us? 

I think renewables will do to gas what gas did to coal, basically economics will make it a thing of the past. When it comes to methane gas, we need to be very careful to quantify its greenhouse gas total impact, so if you burn methane it emits about a third of the CO2 as coal for the same amount of energy, which is great, and therefore, a lot of people call it a clean fuel. However, if you allow methane to escape unburned, then depending on the time period if you pick a period of 20-years, it has more than 80 times the badness of CO2 in terms of a heat-trapping index. Therefore, it takes very little leakage in the methane gas system for it to nullify the environmental benefit of a clean-burning fuel. 

So, unless we’re able to tremendously tighten up our gas supply systems in terms of leakage, it’s not really giving us the kind of environmental progress we’re looking for, and of course it brings concerns about the water table and so-on, which you’re well aware of. So, I think gas is a temporary solution, it’s a bridge solution to a fully zero carbon future, and we’re going to have to get there. To me, at the end of the day, we’re going to flick a light switch and the light’s going to come on, our houses are going to be comfortable, and if we can achieve that with clean energy it will be one of the technological marvels of recent times. From everything I see I’m extremely optimistic that we will get there. 

Not only are there ramifications for the environment, but also ramifications for emerging economies, and even the balance of power in Geo-politics, if you have these extractive economies that are based on pulling non-renewable resources out of the ground, the reduction of reliance on those industries in favour of empowering decentralized generation and consumption of energy, where essentially anybody who has either sun or wind is able to benefit from these technology advancements. I think it’s transformative really for all of humanity and it really is why I’m so excited about it. And of course, you’ve walked the walk and built the zero-carbon house, so you know with your own hands what it takes to achieve this, and you’re accomplishing this as well at Utopus Insights with the work that you do. 

I didn’t mention the rest of the team, I’ve had a chance to meet with the rest of the people on your team, and you’ve got some of the smartest people I think I’ve ever met in weather analytics, and energy analytics, you’re really making it happen. I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to share your thoughts with me Chandu. 

I do have one final question which I always like to ask, which is, if you have a book or resource recommendation that you could share with our listeners, something you would share to anybody, a colleague which you think would be valuable? 

Absolutely. Before I get there, let me just rip-off of something you just said. I am so proud of our team we have assembled here, and in fact it’s now a larger team with our partnership with Vestas, they are a company that’s not only committed to renewable energy, and bringing it to the world, but they’re also committed to the digitization vision that we discussed. It’s that vision and that wisdom which caused all of this partnership to happen, and I think the two together can achieve some amazing things. 

In terms of resources I’d like to point out a couple of books I read recently which I think would be very-very interesting to your listeners. The first one is a really entertaining book called, ‘The Last Days of Night’, it’s by Graham Moore and it’s a really fascinating retelling of the legal battles between Edison and Westinghouse with Nikola Tesla playing a very key role at the end of the 1800’s. It’s really a fascinating book about the dawn of electricity.  

I’m an unlikely entrepreneur, I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur in my life, I have a scientific background, and when I was thrust into this position of running a start-up, I felt like I had to educate myself, and I got my hands on lots of different books, courses, and so-on to try to learn how to do this better. To a large extent its commonsense I suppose, but one book I particularly enjoyed is called, ‘Scaling Up. How a Few Companies Make it and Why the Rest Don’t’, by Verne Harnish. He talks very much about how to design a business for scale, from the ground-up.  

So those would be my two choices for your listeners, and I hope they enjoy them. 

Those are terrific, in fact I don’t have either of those so those get added to my list of books to read. With that we’re going to wrap things up.  

This is Ed Maguire, Insights Partner at Momenta, many thanks to Chandu Visweswariah of Utopus Insights, which is now part of Vestas. It’s been a great conversation and I look forward to following-up and seeing all the innovations you guys are bringing to market, so thank you. 

Thank you very much Ed, appreciate it.