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Up until now consumers have been in the dark about their energy consumption
and even energy providers have really been in the dark
about how their consumers consume their product.
What Tendril’s software platform allows both consumers of energy
and suppliers of energy to do is gain unprecedented insight
and control into the supply and consumption of energy.
And it’s to supplier’s benefit by being able to better match supply
and demand leading to more efficiency in the grid.
And consumers benefit by getting real time insight
and control allows them to spend less on their energy
and emit less CO2 in the environment.
Our studies show that when consumers are given real time access to information
about their energy consumption they can reduce that consumption
by 10% to 15% which can be really meaningful
in the overall scope of energy management.
So starting a technology company is never easy.
You really need three core ingredients to get a company off the ground.
You need a highly educated workforce, you need a marketplace to sell your product,
and you need access to venture capital to help launch the product.
The great thing about the US is it has a great education system
which means there's an abundance of highly trained and highly skilled workers.
It’s a significantly sized market that allows us to sell our products locally
to start with and then, importantly, has a very mature venture capital industry
which allows us to gain the seed capital
we need in order to get the company off the ground.
That said, while the US is a great place to start a company,
the Smart Grid in the energy revolution that it encapsulates is a global problem
and so we’ve moved quickly as a company to start exporting our technology products
and services to other markets, including Europe and South America.
The kind of change that the energy industry is going through is every bit as big
as what we’ve seen from the telecoms industry in the last 20 years.
And if you look at lessons that we can learn from the telecoms industry
and apply them to the energy industry, we can see that the number one lesson
is we should be humble about our ability to predict
what the killer application is going to be here.
Even Google didn’t really predict Google and so we shouldn’t imagine
that we’re going to be able to predict all of the applications
in the energy industry.
We’ve been very active with the National Institute of Standards
and Technology, deriving the process of standards.
We believe it’s not sufficient just to follow the standards process
but it’s important to drive and define these standards
that are going to define the Smart Grid.
So I’ve testified to the US Senate related to standards in the Smart Grid
to consumer choice in the Smart Grid and the creation of a marketplace
by driving open standards into the Smart Grid,
all of which we think are important to make the Smart Grid a success.
The commitment to open standards in the Smart Grid marketplace
not only drives our innovation but allows all sorts of other customers
to enter this marketplace and deliver products and services of their own.
The energy revolution is going to be every bit as big as the telecom revolution.
And if we look at the telecom revolution,
it’s driven huge change in society, mostly for benefit.
It’s freed up the flow of information, it’s created jobs and wealth,
and driven a whole set of businesses that were headed to unimagined.
We see the same thing for the energy industry.
So it doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you sit,
becoming more energy efficient as a society is an important driver.
It drives jobs. It drives better environmental policy.
It drives energy independence.
And those things together create means for a better society.