Gristle Crüe Call — Anode Labs Primer

This week we had Evan from Anode­Labs on to walk us through how Anode is going to approach a blockchain + meat­space project deal­ing with the ener­gy grid, decar­boniza­tion, and dis­trib­uted ener­gy sys­tems. This may set the record for most infor­ma­tion in the least amount of time.

Here are my notes:

Evan Caron is based out of Austin, Texas. Start­ed in oil, coal, nat­ur­al gas ener­gy mar­kets, fin­ished up as a man­ag­ing direc­tor on Wall Street — he’s a finan­cial pro­fes­sion­al in the world of ener­gy mar­kets. His LinkedIn is here.

Left in 2017, start­ed a plat­form that was an inter­sec­tion between blockchain and renew­able energy.

Raised cap­i­tal in May of 2022 for Anode, there are cur­rent­ly about 15 peo­ple at company

Sept of 2022, they’re focused on launch & success

The questions Anode is trying to answer are:

How do we con­nect devices, dis­trib­uted ener­gy sources, and decar­boniz­ing? How do we fig­ure out a way to get real­ly inter­est­ing com­mu­ni­ty engagement?

How do we deploy assets at scale, with com­mu­ni­ty ownership?

Hasty Notes:

Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act in North America

Load — Ener­gy draw. This is your fridge, your AC, your lights, etc.

Gen­er­a­tion — Ener­gy sup­ply. These include con­ven­tion­al pow­er plants as well as solar and wind.

OEM pow­er walls, behind the meter resources

Con­trol­lable load resources vs dynam­ic load resources

Sup­ply & demand has to be bal­anced at all times for the physics of the grid to function

Unlock val­ue through efficiency

The “wires and poles” are owned by consumers?

Steel poles — long distance

Wood poles — local communities

Focus­ing on demand response — con­trol­lable load resources

Util­i­ty has to con­nect those resources to the grid

Bal­anc­ing mar­ket: Every minute of every day the price for elec­trons change

Gen­er­a­tor

Load

Units of pow­er vs units of load

All load has to be served.

HVAC — 4 kw pow­er typ­i­cal use (a “load”)

-called “demand response” , hard to do because of the lim­it­ed data available

Solar pan­els  (or solar farm) - Pro­duc­ing electrons

“Neg­a­tive load” because the meter is say you’re gen­er­at­ing power

If the util­i­ty can under­stand how much I can gen­er­ate, then they can pay me for it.

Pow­er stor­age (can be either a con­sumer or producer)

Bat­ter­ies need to buy elec­trons at cer­tain peri­ods of time, then store them, then release them

The clos­er the elec­tron is to the point of con­sump­tion, the more effi­cient it is in serv­ing the load.

Util­i­ties would love to know whether or not you’d be will­ing to shut off your AC

-if they can accu­rate­ly guess AND guar­an­tee — that’s where the val­ue is

Anode is an aggre­ga­tion service.

“Dis­trib­uted ener­gy resources”

Anode is US only to begin

World­wide, the ener­gy grid is either a 50 or 60 hz system

The cost of pow­er in Europe is 10X that of the US.

UK, EU are impor­tant markets.

Robust pow­er markets: 

Lots of renew­able adoption

Con­strained

Areas Anode will tar­get: US, Cana­da, Japan, EU, Pacif­ic & islands

“If it could have been done 5 years ago and it hasn’t been done, it’s prob­a­bly not a good idea.”

No one has cracked the code on how to build a robust, decen­tral­ized ener­gy network.

Ener­gy to space/time com­par­i­son is use­ful (Jay’s comment)

• How are you going to deal with tampering/gaming/cheating/spoofing?

There are mul­ti­ple data points around a spe­cif­ic event. 

-hook to grid

-spoof meter

-OEM soft­ware

Every util­i­ty meter in the coun­try has an ID.  They can’t be duplicated.

Would have to hack “Rev­enue grade data points”

It’d take a lot of work to spoof this. 

• How many years until this is wide­ly available?
  • Launch­ing in key mar­kets in North Amer­i­ca first
    • NY, CA, North­east, Texas
    • High den­si­ty of assets PLUS aware­ness of ener­gy bill (high cost of energy)
      • Best loca­tion: Smart devices, smart homes, ener­gy is expensive
    • In Texas alone there’s over a bil­lion dol­lars a year that goes to demand side activities
  • Test­net, then beta to par­tic­i­pate and try, then main net
  • Ear­ly 2023 for main net

The pow­er of a mil­lion con­nect­ed house­holds is way more valu­able as a net­work vs the val­ue from each one of those. 

• What can we do to par­tic­i­pate?  How can we help?  Is there a thing we can buy or pre­pare for that will be most valuable?

We haven’t hit scale for NEST or for home bat­tery stor­age systems.

Total pen­e­tra­tion in North Amer­i­ca for smart ther­mostats is 5%. 

By 2024–5, most elec­tric vehi­cles will be bi-direc­tion­al (bat­ter­ies that sup­port the grid)

Be more aware about your ener­gy consumption

EV col­lar (wait until 2023, because of the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act)

Con­nec­tor

Fan

The cheap­est thing you can do is buy a Smart ther­mo­stat off Amazon.

Shad­ow meter (goes into your break­er box, gives you viz into what ener­gy you’re using, and when), this pan­el will be ful­ly cov­ered after Jan­u­ary 1st.

-Pow­erX

-Sense

-Empo­ria (inex­pen­sive)

-Lumin, luminsmart.com

-Full meter box replace­ment through Span https://www.span.io/

• What does Anode mean?

A node in a network

Anode is part of a bat­tery, one of two pieces in a bat­tery that make ener­gy stor­age possible.

As you decar­bonize the pow­er grid you move away from dis­patch­able to inter­mit­tent­ly resources. 

It’s expen­sive to have dis­patch­able pow­er (giant pow­er plants).

MMBTU from $4 to $8 (unit of mea­sure for gas)

Order 2222: If you’re a util­i­ty, you need to allow the “lit­tle guys” to par­tic­i­pate in your net­work. You have until 2025 to imple­ment struc­tures to enable small scale assets to con­tribute to the network. 

The Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act will be a game-changer.

Intrin­sic val­ue is a 3–4 year payback

Anode­Labs Organization

Net­work: react

Token: React

Tax cred­it no caps, 30%