If Silicon Valley ran the power sector: 8 slightly unhinged startup ideas to disrupt the grid
Silicon Valley tech has transformed nearly every facet of our lives, but one of the most impactful shifts it’s brought to bear? Disruption as a norm.
We now have a well-trodden path of manufacturing necessary disruption across industries: mix one part startup platform with one part stale industry, and there you have it—a new model for an old business. Uber for pet sitting? Rover. Notion for shipping logistics? Flexport. The list goes on.
What would happen if we gave energy the same treatment? Could we use these successful Silicon Valley startups as corollaries for shaking up the boring ol’ energy sector?
It’s not beyond reality: Plenty of utilities are publicly thinking about making payments more seamless or integrating AI-backed chatbots to give customers what they now expect in every aspect of their lives: convenience, digitalization, customization, and automation.
So here are my 8 ideas for inspiring utility innovation of the future. And I’m also taking a page from my PoliSci 101 Professor almost 20 years ago: When Larry Sabato wrote “A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country” he highlighted that those proposals weren’t necessarily ones he thought would work in practice, but rather were thought experiments to get us that much closer to the ideal.
Now…let’s get into it ➡️
1. Amazon for Energy Rate Structures
Amazon might not be perfect, but it did get consumers accustomed to instantaneous results following just a few taps on their phone. What if utility customers could make instant changes to upcoming rate structures to optimize for their plans in the same way? Someone expecting to travel a lot in the coming week could shift to a Time-of-Use rate that will result in a lower bill. Households having company for a few days could buy into a flat rate that could be advantageous.
If you could press a few buttons on your smart phone and see this automatically change, wouldn’t you? And if more accurate data about expected power use could help the utility plan ahead, could the resultant savings be passed to those responsive customers?
2. Airbnb for Distributed Energy Assets
For plenty of households, the prospect of solar panels and batteries allowing you to generate and store your own power sounds appealing (especially with rising rates). But not all customers have the capital or credit to take on initial installation costs.
Already, some companies allow cash-strapped customers to “lease” the equipment on their rooftop so they get (a portion of) utility bill savings without the high upfront costs. But what if you took that a step further into the Airbnb model: put your rooftop on the market for people who are interested in solar energy but don’t have the rooftop to do so themselves (e.g., renters). Think of it like a matchmaking marketplace, connecting rooftop space with would-be solar punks and splitting costs and savings based on the rooftop owners’ preferences.
3. OpenTable for Power Consumption
Let’s say you’re hosting an outdoor concert at your home. You know it’ll be power intensive, but you don’t want to 1) strain the local grid or 2) get charged an arm and a leg for doing so.
What if, instead of just plugging in and letting the grid deal with the repercussions, you could turn to an OpenTable-style reservation app and see a schedule of current days/times with low expected demand? Set your reservation for your demand spike in the app in exchange for discounted rates, and send an early signal to the grid that it will need some extra planning (while sending other major consumers to a different day so your excess consumptions don’t overlap).