Factor This
Launched in 2022, the Factor This Podcast has featured many of the most influential leaders driving the energy transition. From solar and battery storage executives to utility CEOs, the Factor This Podcast brings unique insights and answers to the energy industry’s most pressing challenges. Go beyond high-level trends and mainstream talking points with actionable takeaways.
The Factor This Podcast grew in 2023 with the addition of This Week in Cleantech, a weekly roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy in 15 minutes or less. With new episodes every Friday, Factor This content director Paul Gerke and Mike Casey, a cleantech commentator and president of Tigercomm, bring listeners the most important headlines of the week while featuring the leading journalists behind the stories.
The all-new FactorThis.com is your best source for news, commentary, and analysis of renewable energy and the power grid.
Factor This
Unifying awareness, control, and settlements to solve grid instability
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Talk about systems and solutions is everywhere across the utility sector, but the biggest challenges the grid is facing are more about coordination than hardware. As utilities, retail suppliers, and operators all compete to manage the same DERs like electric vehicles, solar infrastructure, and smart appliances, the biggest challenges are associated with alignment, timing and expectations on every side.
Michael Grasso, CEO and founder of GridRails, has a keen awareness of these challenges. His decades of experience in the industry has exposed him to teams and processes that have become paralyzed by fragmented tech silos and sluggish financial settlement cycles that take anywhere from 30 to 120 days to resolve. That's why his company is working to solve these challenges by introducing an agnostic, software-as-a-service (SaaS) orchestration layer that unifies these fragmented endpoints into a single platform, giving energy suppliers direct control over their network operations.
We caught up with him to explore why his platform structures its solution around three core pillars, what it means for consumers to receive instant financial gratification in a digital wallet for adjusting their energy usage in the moment, the importance of shifting the utility paradigm from a penalty-based framework to a real-time incentive model, and much more.
Want to make a suggestion for This Week in Cleantech? Nominate the stories that caught your eye each week by emailing Paul.Gerke@clarionevents.com