Archive for the ‘cpower’ tag
Thomas Weisel Partners Alternative Energy & Natural Resources Conference 2009
Thomas Weisel Partners is an investment banking firm based in San Francisco with offices here in New York, and I attended their annual energy conference this week. I skipped the natural resources presentations on the fourth floor of the New York Palace and headed straight to the fifth where the “alternative” energy presentations were taking place.
Around 40 public and private “alternative” energy companies presented – in three different rooms simultaneously, so I could only get to a few of them. I did notice that one or more of Thomas Weisel’s analysts are particularly interested in electric motors – they seemed to be disproportionately represented, with firms like UQM Technologies and Zenn Motor Company presenting.
Although I am particularly interested in energy generation – and especially geothermal which was also very well represented at the conference – I forced myself to attend presentations in other areas of cleantech. One area that I hadn’t spent much time focusing on was energy efficiency/management, and CPower, based here in New York, caught my attention.
The core of CPower’s business is demand response: basically, energy utilities are prepared to pay market rates for large energy consumers to be on standby to reduce their energy consumption when demand is high. Effectively, when grid capacity is strained, the utility remotely controls a company’s high-demand appliances and will shut them down after giving notice as short as half an hour or even 10 minutes. In exchange, the utility compensates the company for lost production time. This is cheaper – and more energy efficient – than the utility building out more energy production capacity.
CPower also provides other services for their clients, such as helping improve energy efficiency for clients, and peak load management. Peak load management is important because utilities will charge energy consumers a base rate based on the previous year’s peak load. So even if the company only averages 50% of its maximum power usage (”peak load”), they’ll still pay a premium for the privilege of drawing the peak load they drew last year. So CPower helps companies save money by reducing their peak load.
It was also great to see Petra Solar, whose utility pole solar project in New Jersey I’d written about previously.