Episode 38: A utility that's investing in the energy transition. I know, right!?

National Grid Partners is a corporate venture fund that's invested $480 million in innovations to improve transmission, reliability, and renewable energy.

So, let’s acknowledge up front that utilities aren’t doing nearly enough to assist in the energy transition.

After maybe fossil fuel companies themselves, utilities are absolutely central to one of the biggest things we can do to stop emitting greenhouse gases: transition to renewable energy sources, and then electrify everything, as fast as humanly possible. That’s because they’re the outfits that generate (aka, build power plants) and distribute electricity to homes and businesses and everywhere else electricity goes.

So, utilities are very much on the hook to build more renewable capacity, figure out how to integrate energy that isn’t consistently available, like wind and solar, build out their transmission networks to handle the already increasing load posed by electrifying everything, and harden their infrastructure to keep the lights and the heat and the air conditioning on in the face of increasingly severe weather.

Some are handling this better than others.

As ChatGPT put it: “Here's an illustration showcasing a power utility distributing renewable energy to homes equipped with solar panels and electric vehicles in the driveways. It also highlights how these homes feed excess energy back to the power utility, symbolizing a sustainable and harmonious collaboration for a greener future.” Credit: DALL-E

And some are investing not only in their own operations, but are setting up corporate venture funds to invest in the innovations they’ll need to do everything I detailed above, and more. This week on the show, I talked with Steve Smith, the new CEO of National Grid Partners, which is the corporate venture arm of the energy behemoth National Grid Group. National Grid Partners has been around since 2018 and Smith told me it’s invested some $480 million into startups working on everything from more efficient electricity transmission to figuring out how to create green hydrogen from natural gas after the gas has already been piped to its destination (called point of use) — aka, no new infrastructure required.

Plus, we got to geek out on my favorite topic, which is decentralization, and all the ways that people will eventually be generating their own power, whether through solar or on-site batteries or electric cars equipped with bidirectional charging, so they can charge a house or feed power back to the grid when necessary—and get paid for it, hello.

It’s an interesting conversation, and hopefully one that spurs other utilities to get moving in terms of modernizing their own operations and also investing in companies and technologies that can benefit us all. Have a listen here and tell your friends!