July 13, 2009

Yeager works on renewed

effort for deregulation

The Galvin Electricity Initiative is expanding its full-time staff to accommodate the smart grid industry's move into the "implementation stage," co-founder Kurt Yeager told us Friday.  He and Bob Galvin, who once ran Motorola, wrote the book "Perfect Power" and started Galvin's namesake initiative.

          John Kelly and Greg Rouse, two executives who had consulted with Galvin and Yeager in "small roles" when they worked at Endurant Energy, have moved over to the Galvin initiative full-time, Kelly told us Friday.  They will run a Chicago-based Intelligent Power Partners group that Yeager believes will grow to a staff of six or eight by the end of the year.

          Kelly and Rouse were contracted to help design and build prototypes such as the one Galvin is building at the Illinois Institute of Technology plus help implement Galvin's "quality education" initiative for utilities.

          "We'd like to help teams that win DOE [matching grant] money to integrate designs from 'Perfect Power'," Kelly noted.

          That firstly involves "providing the means for consumer participation" in energy use management, he added.

          "It involves technology and policies that would maximize the consumer's ability to reduce their demand, consumption, carbon emission footprint and cost, which is what they care about," Kelly said.  "Right now, consumers don't even see what they are using on an hourly basis."

          "Perfect Power" designs also would have utilities "achieving significant reliability improvements at very low cost," Kelly said, noting that the quality management system Bob Galvin advocates in the name of increased reliability has deep roots -- namely in the quality-control methods Galvin brought to Motorola in the '70s.

          Kelly and Grouse will focus on regulatory reform including working with five or six governors' offices and state legislatures and PUCs to shoot for "a more consumer-focused electricity-delivery system" in the US.

          The four-year-old initiative is just about where Yeager thought it would be by now.  "When you are trying to change the rules and business models, it doesn't happen overnight."

          Yeager is starting to push for the US government to give deregulation another go but to do a better job of it than it did with the Energy Act of 1992.

            Kelly put together the design study that led to the IIT Perfect Power Grid and has been a "major contributor" to New Mexico's "green grid initiative," Yeager noted.

          The addition of Kelly and Grouse to the Galvin Electricity Initiative's full-time crew amounts to the initiative making "a three-six year commitment to help with the transformation to a more consumer-focused electricity system" in the US, Kelly said.

          "A number of [smart grid] projects are seeking our advice and counsel," Yeager said.  "We want to gear up so that when we agree to help, we can deliver on our promises."