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Planet-Profit Report, reporting on sustainable development in the Western United States.

Leading the way to smart grids for emerging nations

A Colorado company starts in Haiti

Starting this month, Dan Gregory, CEO of Denver-based Green Energy Corp., will launch an international effort to build a visionary 21st-century smart grid model for sustainable clean energy deployment in emerging nations, starting with a pilot project in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

About a week after Haiti’s disaster, an NGO named AIDG, based in Cap Haitien, in coordination with the UN, invited Gregory to participate on a 10-person structural engineering team to assess the damage to critical buildings.
“Our initial team arrived in Port-au-Prince on January 20th, and we inspected 115 hospitals, UN facilities, schools, orphanages, and food warehouses,” Gregory says.

The team established the UN Emergency Engineering Services Unit, which has inspected over 50,000 structures to date.

Gregory’s efforts in Haiti brought GEC to the attention of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), which invited it to become a member. GEC’s “commitment” to CGI is to establish a pilot implementation of Gregory’s Global Energy Model (GEM), which is a road map to integrating all elements of a nation's energy infrastructure—environment, economy, agriculture, security, technology, education and jobs.

Says Gregory, “GEM is a model that will evolve over decades as it is applied, tested, and adjusted by the [CGI] GEM Working Group. The pilot in Haiti helps form and stress-test the GEM Model. We expect other GEM pilot projects in other developing nations to begin during 2011. Pilot projects like Haiti will produce measurable results against milestones, but the true impact of GEM on any nation will take a decade or more to be realized. The point of GEM is to provide a coordinated roadmap for energizing developing nations.”

GEC gained its experience in smart grid technology in part from its merger with another Colorado company, Magpie Software, in August. Magpie, founded by former Bell Labs engineers in 2001 to build telecommunications software for companies like Polycom and Avaya, had grown to nearly 50 employees.

About the same time Magpie began to see growth opportunities in the telecom industry decline as it matured, the buzz around smart energy grids grew in Colorado, particularly due to Xcel Energy’s SmartGridCity pioneer project in Boulder. So Magpie launched a smart energy practice, spearheaded by Roxy Podlogar, vice president of product strategy, designing smart energy software, notably for companies like home area network specialist Tendril Inc.

“We realized that the smart grid was essentially two-way communications laid over the power grid and has all of the same problems you can see with telecommunications: large, scalable systems, having to handle multiple end points, knowing the health of the network, reconfiguring it, that sort of thing,” says Podlogar, who subsequently identified Green Energy as a potential partner.

Adds Elaine Pelletier, GEC’s chief commercial officer: “In the early 80s, telecommunications had mechanical switches, and the same thing is happening with smart grid. You have all of these old, power-producing, not mechanical, but dated devices and in order to get to this [smart grid] transformation you have to overlay that with digital intelligence. So the challenge is the same.”

Pelletier says Green Energy was looking for a “tight partnership” to do the software engineering for its Green Bus and the Total Grid Management system and “we were some of the few people who actually have that experience.”