By Greer Gosnell
Date: July 10, 2024
At the beginning of the academic year of 2016-2017, when I started my postdoctoral research position at LSE, my colleague Dr. Antoine Dechezlepretre introduced me to a professor of climate economics at Imperial College London named Ralf Martin, whose team was looking to collaborate with field experimentalist with a background in energy and environmental economics.
Ralf had an idea that would relax constraints on global energy systems, which require dispatchable or “firm” power – such as coal or natural gas – to be available in significant quantities to balance supply with demand. He assembled a team that included his co-author at Imperial College London, Zeynep Gurguc (a pow-dr co-Founder).
Together, we spent 2017-2020 securing funding, developing the technical and research concepts, and piloting the technology: smart (wifi-connected) plugs that can convert any ‘dumb’ electronic or appliance to an interactive device controllable both by users and by third parties with users’ consent.
Technologies that enable ‘demand-side responsiveness’ (DSR) can facilitate the expansion of intermittent renewable energy resources (e.g., wind and solar) by making electricity use responsive to production, thereby balancing supply and demand without the need for further fossil fuel power plant buildout. In our case, the technology would balance the grid through development of ‘virtual power plants’ composed of collections of smart devices. These virtual power plants at the feeder level can thereby prevent lock-in of the greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions from fossil fuel generation, while encouraging economic development and well-being through increased energy access and reliability (i.e. avoided outages).
Pilot trials in UK student halls allowed us to develop sufficient proof of concept to bring the technology to more important and neglected markets, such as India. As a visiting scholar at UCSD in 2019-2020, I reconnected with a colleague, Teevrat Garg, whom I had met years earlier at an economics research conference. In a coffee chat, he mentioned that JPAL had begun a new funding initiative — the King Climate Action Initiative (KCAI) — to fund JPAL-style RCTs with a focus on climate change mitigation and poverty reduction.
Skipping to the punchline, we decided to apply for KCAI funding to introduce the technology we’d developed in the UK in Teevrat’s home country of India. India had ongoing ambitions to rapidly expand intermittent renewable energy capacity while relying on significant coal power plant development to supply its firm power and support rapid growth in energy demand (e.g., due to increased need for and adoption of air conditioning in the coming decades). Our application was successful, and we began working with JPAL (and, to a lesser degree, CEEW) to set up a pilot trial in Panchkula, Haryana. Around this time, we welcomed a new member of the team – software guru, Steve Todd – to join us on the journey.
Our intervention involved home visits and the Covid-19 lockdown led to severe delays and suppression of our field work. Nonetheless, we successfully deployed several dozen plugs and were able to demonstrate compelling evidence that households that adopt are highly willing for us to remotely turn off their electronics or appliances for a brief period of time – events we call ‘pow-downs’ – without overriding (compliance rates were over 90%). We also learned about the critical importance of social marketing to develop awareness and trust among a community prior to deployment of a novel intervention like ours, and likewise the importance of population targeting.
Following this early proof of concept, we were fortunate to receive seed funding from the SED Fund, an Indian foundation focused on just energy transitions via venture philanthropy, as well as a smaller proof of concept grant from CA CARES.
With wind behind our sails, we worked to quickly solidify our founding team – Zeynep Gurguc, Teevrat Garg, and Greer Gosnell (“the three G’s”) – with invaluable ongoing support from our scientific advisor, Ralf Martin, and our COO-for-hire, Steve Todd. The rest, as they say, is history.
While not formally a part of our team, we’d like to acknowledge a few funders and contractors who have so far supported our early journey as a venture: MVP Rockets, Rethink Priorities’ Special Projects team, UCSD Wavemaker Lab, and Shawn+Sarah.
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