Shamik Mehta, Hitachi Vantara
In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Shamik Mehta with Hitachi Vantara about “Bi-Directional Data Flow and the Positive Impact to the Utility Grid”. Get the answers to your “Grid Data Analytics” questions along with Shamik's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!
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SHAMIK MEHTA'S CONTACT INFORMATION:
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shamikmehta/
Hitachi Vantara's Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hitachi-vantara/
Hitachi Vantara's Company Website: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html
PODCAST VIDEO:
Other Powerful Resources from Hitachi Vantara:
Smart Transportation and Smart Energy Combine to Electrify our Future | LinkedIn
IoT, AI and Edge Analytics in Connected Automobiles | LinkedIn
https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/resources.html#vid=6237195964001
https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/resources.html#vid=6090132685001
https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/resources.html#vid=5576234655001
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
utility, grid, hitachi, transformer, happening, problems, talk, people, electron, energy, home, mehta, car, companies, power, sun, electricity, solar, update, battery
Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go again, welcome to industrial talk of the place, this place of this platform that celebrates industry heroes such as yourself, you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly you innovate, you change lives, you're changing the world, you're solving problems, why not celebrate you? That's how I geek out each and every day. Thank you very much for what you do. All right, in the hot seat. in the hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of a Shamik Mehta. Now, if I go to his handy dandy stat card, he is the director of industry solutions, marketing with Hitachi Ventura, done a lot of work with a dodgy Vantara great people, great company, always dedicated to solving problems. They love it. Love it, let's, oh, we're going to be talking, we're going to be talking utilities. Now. You know, I'm always geeking out my background, utilities, climate towers, satin poles doing what I did with Southern California Edison, and enjoyed every moment. So I geek out on this stuff. So just, you know, buckle in, because we're gonna have a great time, let's get cracking with the conversation. Of course, like, I just love this stuff. There's a lot of great challenges out there, within the utility spaces, digital transformation, what do we do? How do we support the future going forward? How do we create a stable grid? How do we solve problems, so that we can, you know, be more renewable, whatever it might be, whatever that focus needs to be, we've got to have a really nimble type of grid to be able to handle all of these wonderful, wonderful ideas and thinking out there that are being brought to you by those Hitachi Vantara. And other companies that are pushing the envelope innovative, they're gonna solve the problem so that when you flip that light switch on, light comes on. You don't have to worry about flickering or doing anything. That's what they bring to the table before I get a correction on that. Couple of things. One, I've just came back from Denver, and if you've never been to Denver, great people. Yes. Good food, absolutely. Beautiful. Oh, baby, we we climbed a mountain. But they have some great companies out there with great people. And I was very fortunate, very honored, very
excited to be able to work with a company called cap logistics now, you know, as well as I do, you've got logistics, you've got the supply chain challenges, you've got sourcing issues, you've got all of that wrapped up into what do we do? How do we how do we solve some of the problems? cap logistics is a company that is right at the edge trying to figure this out, trying to and and they've got the street guide as credit to prove it, right. They've got the street cred. Cap logistics, a great company. So they opened some doors for me to be able to meet with some great leaders within the Denver Colorado area. And I want to just give a shout out to the water design build Council. So I was able to meet with them. And you know what? They're talking about? Yeah, water. They're talking about solving problems. They're talking about addressing the issues that we have today, right? Today, because well, between you and me, one we take the water for granted to ride. When we pull it out of the tap, we just know that it's, you know, going to be okay. Water design build council wants to keep that moving forward, working with some great, great engineering firms to make that happen. Talking about and solving problems that are impacting water today. The next one is the Colorado Business Roundtable. It is made up of professionals within the Colorado area, big time professionals. Again, looking at ways of being able to solve problems collaborating, innovation, you name it, educating it's happening there. The Executive Director, Debbie Brown is an incredible leader making it wonderful solutions available with this particular organization. Working closely with them. She's got a passion to definitely solve problems and and again, again, we collaborate right? We collaborate because we do not have all the answers and the Colorado business roundtable definitely has made that a point. The other one was a fun trip to whistling hair distillery this is this is a business that was developed by a gentleman by the name of Sandy Roth. His pedigree is Deloitte. He Has heaps with them forever. You go out to whistling hair, get the tour, see the passion. It's like mad scientists, all of the stuff incredible, incredible opportunity. And and of course, a decent product know a really good product beyond decent. They are passionate, it's fun seeing them talk about what they do. The one that I geeked out probably the most is with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. So I met with George sparks. He is the the executive director there. And it's a museum, right? I love learning I love and what they're trying to do and what they're working on is to be able to pull in what our hat what's happening in the community and reflect that in the museum. What is important to people in the community? And how do we continue to educate? How do we continue to develop insights to, you know, for a better tomorrow. They just, I'm telling you, a guy that like me that that'll go to a museum, you're looking at a guy that just gets off all squishy and just loves that stuff. That's the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, you got to go out there, you got to just do it, go to Denver, because it's pretty cool. And then finally, I was able to meet with a young lady by the name of Michelle Barnes, head of HHS, talked a little bit about what's happening within the Denver, Colorado State as a whole. What are they doing? How are they doing it? She's She's caught a lot of passion. A lot of it's just pretty bright. So there's a lot of wonderful conversations that had taken place in Colorado, again, very appreciative to cap logistics for giving me the opportunity to meet with all of these wonderful, wonderful professionals in the Denver area. One last thing because we're always about this. Now two last things. One, the manufacturing technology show Cleveland, Ohio, been to Cleveland, wonderful community, this is November 9, through the 11th it is theirs, it's two you can be there in person is there's a virtual boom, you just got to be there because manufacturing is being impacted by digital transformation each and every day. must must no more. And then finally, industry, industrial talk to Dotto is getting we're getting closer every every day, this is going to be your single location to all things industry. Go there, find out more paying on into whoever you want to talk to, it's all going to be available. My role, industrial talks role, and the team industrial talks role is to make it easy for you to get the information you need to be successful. Because we want you to survive. We want you to rebuild and we want you to prosper because you are that important because you're changing the world. Whew
that was a hell of an intro big time. All right, let's get back to this conversation that we're having with in geeky utility stuff. Show me I really had a great time talking to you you're going to enjoy this conversation because it's it's nice to see come a companies like Hitachi Ventura really put toward the effort to try to solve problems and there are other companies out there and and it is incumbent upon us to be able to highlight and be able to celebrate these individuals should make does not and I mean does not disappoint. His last name is MEH ta his stat card is out there. Mehta is the way you say that last night and last name and reach out to him. Yeah. MIT to so you know, he's quite a quite a smart guy. Alright, enjoy the conversation, Shamik Welcome to the industrial talk podcast, I am looking forward to our conversation. We should make it myself and others. When I can't say others, you'll be listening to it. We're gonna be talking about bi-directional data flow. This is a utility centric. This is a power centric. This is a grid centric type of conversation. And I want to make sure that everybody out there, the listeners out there recognize that this is a real important topic has real ramifications. And I think that there are real solutions. And that's what Shamik and Hitachi Vantara bring to the table. All right, you make. How about that?
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me here. This is exciting. Excellent. I love it. It's
a little background on who you are.
Absolutely. So yeah, I'm Shamik Mehta. I am a director of industry solutions marketing at Hitachi Ventura. I'm based here in sunny California in the Bay Area. Our headquarters are in Santa Clara for Hitachi Ventura. That's where we are But as always, as you can tell from behind me. And staying busy with a lot of activities in data management and understanding how utilities that oil and gas and energy industries are evolving, how we're a grid is getting modern and more and more communicative with each other. How electrification is evolving everywhere? And how can technologies and software help ease that problem? My background is in renewable energy. I worked for six years in a company called sun Edison, which was a very large IPP, or independent power producer. At one point it was
sun Edison, what Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do they do? What what type of assets do they have?
So son Edison is a solar and wind IPP was a solar and wind independent power producer. So they were they invented the power purchase agreement. If you know what that is,
yes, that's where negotiate ISO fours, ISO, ISO ones, firm contracts as available contracts. I know a little bit about them.
Awesome, then you're on the same page, but suddenly decided that and it was a very large ship up to a three gigawatt pipeline of solar and wind and energy storage projects around the world, where I was the director of operations for our battery based energy storage products, added product management, Product Marketing for everything from heterogeneous transistor cells, a JT cells that go into the modules or panels as they're called to the micro inverters on the back of the panels to single axis trackers that hold the machines that points the panels of the sun and track it around for 20% extra gain. And then energy storage systems with lithium ion batteries and the controller and inverters and everything all built into argument and, you know, flattened out before the shoulders when the sun starts to dip with energy storage, or when wind starts to die down. So the fascinating run losers, I understand we'll get into it. Don't
get me wrong, we'll get into it. However, this is an interesting coverage. Were you familiar with solar one down and Daggett? Yes. That was those are interesting. That's an interesting technology, because to your point, they're tracking the sun, shining it up on a collector and I think at that particular time, the last iteration was salt, melting salt, so that they can generate steam at night.
Yes, CSP, concentrated solar power. And yeah, parabolic mirrors that we're used to I mean, if you apply where Las Vegas you can see those giant fields where they're aggregating right there, all those all the panels are all the mirrors are reflecting and collecting into a single collector. And that is used to get so hot that it it melts the molten salt and other gases, and it creates energy storage out of it. pretty fascinating. and bright. That's very, very bright. You can see a train to break away. He did. Yes, you can. Again, I
got it. I gotta go around. So now it's when they were, I remember as a younger man, watching them get into the focus. So they're taking those mirrors and they're interesting. I'm not on the the collector, but above it. Right? Yeah, it would just be this white spot
in the house. Yes. Amazing. But you know, the great thing is we're barely tapped into the power of the sun. Did you know that every minute, the earth gets enough photon energy from the sun to power our entire world's energy needs for an entire year. In one minute, one minute, in one minute, we get enough energy from the photon. From all the photons that hit us, from the sun to power our entire world's energy needs for one year.
I've never heard that. That's amazing.
Think about that. Instead, we exactly. I was at a conference where Elon Musk was talking and he said that if you were to take 1/8 of the state of Nevada and turn it into solar panels you can power to walk away Yeah, I
don't heard that one either. That's that's Yeah, I mean to It's incredible how much the sun has a conversation to talk about later because I'm telling you right now that that's an interesting and staggering stack. I'm gonna I'm just I'm just telling you that that's there's plenty of room out there in Vegas, too. They could probably do it this time. All right. Let's talk a little bit about when I when I was a utility lineman when I was in utilities. The model the the the actual power model, power Gen grid utility model is pretty basic, pretty straightforward. Big thermal generating assets, transmission lines, substations and so on. As as time has gone on. We use to negotiate power purchase agreements, and we used to bring online assets that were considered alternative. Now were they efficient, somewhere somewhere, not it just is what it is. But we had to begin to address and and recognize that these generations shorts are on the grid. And we always had trouble with winnt var sucking, stable grid challenges all the stuff in the San Gorgonio Pass Tehachapi. And we had to figure something out. Fast forward to today, where you stand where, where we stand, and where we talk about digital transformation, the journey and how it's impacting the utility. What is the utility the grid, the people dealing with today? With that reality? And how are we going to solve that problem, it's going to happen it is happening, what do we do?
It is happening, we call that decentralization and diversification. And what that means is you like you rightly said, energy used to be or still is generated in a nuclear power plant, or at a hydro dam, or at a large facility somewhere, usually very far away from a city, or where the people who need that electricity to reside. And then that electricity is transmitted over, you know, high tension cables, alongside highways that you see everywhere, that 122,000 140,000 volts, and transferred 1000s or 10s, of 1000s of miles to and then distributed and broken down into smaller and smaller steps with transformers and other HVDC equipment, high voltage DC equipment, and then eventually they will come to your home at 120 volt range, right. But it's a long journey that those that electron took from a nuclear plant or a dam somewhere in the Sierras. In California, for example, to where I live here in Silicon Valley. That's a traditional model of electricity generation, transmission distribution, and consumption by the end user being right, that's what they call the energy value chain. Today, it's becoming less and less disrupted, disrupted, because what's happening is, people are realizing that you can generate energy cleanly closer to where it's going to be consumed. So your solar rooftops, or a parking lot, or a college or a school, or a large Home Depot type of a box store where the roots are viable, you can put a lot of solar panels and generate electricity, where it's going to be consumed. So that traditional model of generating electricity from far and transmitting and distributing it down to the retail level has changed significantly and is undergoing even faster change as we speak.
So what's interesting, where you we we've sort of painted the historical picture is that the value chain was wonder it's almost like just one direction, like, big, cut it in half, cut it down all the way down to the consumer level where we can just, you know, run that blender, and that's, I can follow that. And, and things on the other side of the transformer. It wasn't going the other way. Now, when we start talking about now, we're, we're going back, I have a solar planner, I can I can pump it back into the grid.
Yes, that's where the positive things right? Right. So and you do this, for the most part, especially in the USA have done a very good job of honoring that power, the distributed power that's been generated, not everywhere, but for the most part, it works quite well. So for here in California, for example, we will, our utilities will allow us to give rebates to customers whose meters run backwards. And that's literally what happens. In the middle of the day, solar panels on my house may generate five to seven kilowatts of energy. But if nobody's home, the home is barely consuming about a kilowatt, or maybe three kilowatts, depending upon air conditioning, and you know, refrigeration needs, but there's no lighting, there's no fans, there's nothing else really happening. There's no electric charging of cars, because the cars have gone to work for the owners. So when that happens, the excess energy can be pumped back into the grid, and the meter literally reverses. You remember the old style meters, which had a little disk that spun on it, right. And as the more electricity you use, the faster returns and it's your measured, your bill is measured based upon those revolutions, it took a while literally the mirrors would slow down to the point that they turned reverse and the disk spins backwards because now your home is generating electricity and giving it back to the grid. And when that happens, utilities often will give you credit for that doesn't happen everywhere. But in the more progressive states, they will pay you back for that money, which is fantastic because now you have electricity flowing in both directions. And with smart meters, electronic meters, which has got instrumentation in it. A combination of computers, a combination of wireless internet connectivity, and power or battery power is enough to power that information about how much energy is being used and how much of energy is being pushed back into the grid. And all of that is available now. In real time,
but it has to be done in real time. I mean, if I'm asked to make if I, if if I'm a utility, and I'm trying to, you know, I'm pretty simple in in matching my supply and my demand, I've got to have the right amount of, you know, electrons meeting the right amount of demand and being able to balance that anymore and he lasts. But that model that you just spoke of requires that quick insight,
right? Yes, it has to, you need to know right away, because what happens when suddenly the somebody comes home and plugs in their Eb charger, because the AV came home from work a little bit early, all of a sudden that that demand and the amount of current that's going back into the grid needs to reverse itself. And it creates a new suck on the grid. Now, most Evie, charge card makers, for example, know that after 11pm at night is when the rates are going to be the lowest. Right? Now, if you heard about something called the duck curve, the duck curve talks about how if you look at the outline, it shows about how energy demands rise as people wake up around six o'clock in the morning and lights turn on. And coffeemakers and microwaves turned on fridge doors are open and closed, then it drops about 910 o'clock at night, in the morning by when people have left their homes and gone to work. And then in the evening, when people come back around four to 5pm. And as they turn on the microwave, cooking appliances and lights go on and all of that, that's when there's a sudden ramp of power. And that's called the duck duck curves neck of the duck. And between four to 9pm is when the grid load on the grid is highest. There's also unfortunately the time when the sun solar panels are beginning to produce less. And wind energy is beginning to die down. Yeah, right. So the demand is rising like crazy. Whereas the supply is constrained. So that neck of the duck as the consumption rises is often when the utilities are forced to charge you a higher price. And that makes perfect sense from their perspective. But imagine if in the middle of the day, when the solar panels on your home were shining and not give was not being used. You could have stored that in a battery. Yeah. And just out of two out of those four hours in the evening, between four to nine, if you could have used those batteries for some of your critical appliances. it eases a grid a lot.
That's a natural conclusion. If that is the case, that duck neck reality you're absolutely spot on about solar production going down as when the sun is at a really lower angle. And then of course when it just sort of lets up. But right. But that is a battery storage solution.
Correct. And, and battery storage now have wheels on them. Your cars are essentially energy storage devices, but they're mobile. So it's a little miniature power plant that's can go to various parts in the city at various times. It can be charged at various rates, often free. Have you seen those carports and schools and other places that colleges take this picture. So if that's a Battery, Battery on wheels,
I come home, I'm at four o'clock, I plug my my handy dandy car in it starts discharging. And I've already plugged it or I've already charged it up with well free solar at work. That's right, you're at work, right and I'm using it, that's an efficient way of extracting that energy.
Exactly. Because if you put energy, you'd increasingly see that canopies over over parking lots increasingly have electric chargers right below it. And no time limits on them either, because you can park there as long as you like. And those panels over there producing enough energy to charge a quarter literally for free. I mean, the owners of the parking lot may not decide to give it to you for free, they may charge you some nominal rate but it doesn't really cost you much to charge the car. So if in the middle of the day you park under a carport which has solar panels on it, you can charge your car for free. So by the time you get home, you don't have a discharged car, your semi or a fully charged car. Yeah. Now you've parked the car in the house and you plug it into your charger, and instead of you charging the car, it doesn't need to it actually discharges the car to ease that duck neck problem for just a couple of hours. Yeah, and then after 11 o'clock at night when the demand has died down. You can charge your car at that point.
Yeah. And and see what you're talking about. That's the innovation that is available out there. That is when we start talking about the the the digital component and the analytics are necessary. But it's also you've got the, the the technology to do that it's Yeah,
that does it. It does. And you know, if you think about it, what do you really need for something like this to happen, you need the automation, you need to you need people to remember to login and not pet or not have to worry about, hey, if I put my car in, I don't want it to start charging. Now, I want to, I want to program it to start charging after midnight, or after 11pm. And the rates are the lowest too. But all of this requires real time information coming from millions of EBS and carports. And charging stations and smart meters. And you imagine this is all data management.
Yeah, I don't know how you know, you bring up a good point. This is just one example, at one home with one power profile. Now multiply that by a million plus. Right, right, then you've got you've got a utility that built off of a very simple structure having to deal with a dynamic, complex. environment is, hey, kudos to those folks. Kudos, because the lights still go on. With all that happening today.
I think our utilities in the entire country are doing a really good job. They are essentially dealing with a tough problem. We don't really have power shortages or outages in our country. We have a lot of talk about how our grid is old, and how its dilapidated and under budgeted. Yes, okay. Many of those criticisms are valid. But if you think about it, how many times have you lost power? In my 30 years of living in Silicon Valley, I must have lost power for a total of about less than 10 times. And only one of those lasted 24 hours. And because because of the proactive shutdown because of the wildfire, danger caused by high winds that made that 24 hour outage happen otherwise, in spite of the grid being his age of 60 years of old, I haven't really had any brownouts or blackouts. So the grid actually managed really well.
You're spot on, I telling you, I agree with you, 100%. And when you paint that picture of how there's this brave new world, this future that's happening, it's happening today, but it's going to continue to evolve, continue to push that envelope and continue to change our lives. It's still we still take it for granted. A story a side note, when I was with a utility, an old lineman came to me and said, Scott, we used to have little interruptions, right? Little, little pops nothing big. And the majority of the people didn't know, they just didn't know, the real problem came when everybody had digital clocks. And then they would just interrupt and then all of a sudden, start blinking. That is how I wanted to go. And we had a power outage. We I didn't fail it. But we had a power outage, and then the background start ringing off the hook. And then that's what became a real problem.
That's right, that's right. Same thing today, two of my microwave starts blinking 12 like the old VCR from 1984. And that's how I know we had a power outage. I never felt it.
Oh, no, not at all. And again, that's a testament to the the innovation that is taking place today within utilities and companies like Hitachi Ventura, I mean, it just is because without that, without companies like Hitachi Ventura and others. These problems, the benefits of what we're trying to accomplish from an energy production perspective, can only be realized and achieved through the innovation and capabilities of companies like Hitachi Ventura, and you and others literally.
Yeah, you know, it takes it takes a few decades of having built the equipment ourselves, like the Transformers in a substation, circuit breakers and high voltage equipment and everything else. And then learning from how they behave over time, we've been equipping our own buildings for materials with IoT sensors and collecting data from how hard to get how much they vibrate, what is the oil analysis inside the transformer look like? And we've been doing that for such a long time that we have built this AI models, artificial intelligence models around it, to learn how to detect an upcoming anomaly or a failure. See, we can now take that knowledge and we can export that and we can help other people understand what that is. That's exactly what we do. It's all science. It's science, about the hardware that we then merge into software intelligence and make it available anywhere anytime in the cloud.
So that's a powerful statement because what what you're talking about is that history having that historical data, having that historical data wrapped around whether Whatever it might be trends demands growth, whatever the the impact of that that electron taking place, and you have that, and then you apply it using that data analytic science applied to an AI, put it in a software, you've already, in essence, you've already just gotten to the point where you only can gain from that, right? Yes, you just become smarter, you just become better.
Yeah, absolutely. So we have to be think about the flow of electrons, which is not bi directional, as we just discussed, as every bit representing every electron representing a bit of data. There is information in every electron trace. So whether the electron is moving into your house or out, you just learned something. That movement of the electron that is now going in two directions, is the bi-directional data. that knowledge is important. It's not just important for me to reduce my bills, it's important for the grid, it's important for the utilities, it's important for the people who generate our power. It's important for them then to know where to put the next power plant and what should it consist of? And what should the next price be for the energy. All of that matters, data matters.
Data matters, man, this is I want to make sure listeners, this is important stuff. This is fascinating stuff. You might not think so you might not be in the world of energy utility. You might be manufacturing, it impacts you. It impacts you in a way that you might not see today, but it will be tomorrow. And thank goodness for company. Let me ask you this. Two questions. One. What are the roadblocks? What are the challenges? And then where do you see it going? We've already painted we've, we've done the past, we've done the present. Let's talk about the future and roadblocks.
Right? So roadblocks. It's difficult for if I were energy utility to figure out where I can spend my precious dollars for infrastructure updates. They need a good amount of foresight into where to update the next transformer because they do not know what's going to fail a lot of the transformers and circuit breakers and everything that has been installed had been installed 40 years ago, 50 years ago, or last distances, and often in very rural areas where it's not easy to always send people it's working fine, but they do not have the insight into whether that equipment is working great, or whether it's time to replace it going out.
Don't you have the the ability from let's say dissolved gases, let's say you take that generation, the transformer analogy, aren't we gaining greater insights into what is a breakdown in the core of transformers and be able to, to a certain extent, have some sort of predictive curve to say, we're looking here and it is, you know, spinning off whatever dissolved gases, whatever, don't we have a better insights into our assets,
we do. But I think we only have them on a fraction of the Transformers that are out there, because the older ones do not have the connectivity built into them. So you got to go and update all of them, either by changing the transformer to a newer one, which has got this connectivity built into it. Or you got to attach external sensors and module that can capture that information and transmitted by our cell tower, because they're often in a location where there is no Wi Fi available. That adds expense. And when you talk about 10s of 1000s of transformers, under just one utilities purview. If you combine that with a 300 utilities we have in our country, that becomes a real problem. So very good at getting that it's a modernization of the equipment that needs to happen. So one of the first roadblocks is you need to there has to be a way to quickly get our existing hardware and infrastructure, power equipment to transmit the information to us. And there is no short answer to that. You can either go out and retrofit all of these or better yet, you wait for them to start failing or dying. And when you know that they are through observation that you can do remotely using a drone, for example, you can then go and decide that we need to update this guy, not the other one. That's same age, but it's not being used as much or without going through as many stress cycles because of better weather conditions or whatever. And you don't need to update the other one. But having that insight into knowing which transformer or which switch gear I may need to update in the next few years is key. And the way they were doing that also is fascinating. They fly drones equipped with heat sensing cameras or LIDAR on it where you can fly them and you can capture the images from them as images. Guess what you need an AI algorithm to understand those images because if you have a bunch of interns looking at the photographs trying to figure out if this is a good transformer or a bad bushing you know we're gonna get there never Are you local utility analyze 1.2 million images last You're alone in Northern California alone.
Okay, so So where do I spend my money? You paint an interesting picture. It is that how do I modernize my, my infrastructure the right way to deploy the right capital at the right time? Now where's where's this future going? What do you see? How come? Why should I not be bullish? or Why should I be bullish on this particular future,
you shouldn't be bullish, because what's going to happen is, you're going to have homes and clusters of homes, act like their own power companies for a few hours a day. So if I have an Eevee, and my neighbor has an Eevee, and the one next to him has an Eevee. And I've got five electric vehicles in this road, or battery based power wall type of products on my walls, which are energy storage devices, I can theoretically aggregate all of them. And now I have my block of homes as a mini virtual power plant. Yeah, so if I take all my cards that are charged, all of them come home, and all of them have a combined capacity, that's now enough to block to power my block for just two hours, my grip doesn't have to bother about providing the power on a hot day, for two hours, that's a huge relief to them, there has to be some monetization around it. So you got to figure out a way to compensate. The car owners who are allowing their cars to discharge into the house and give literally allow my neighbor to borrow energy from my car today. Right. So there has to be a peer-to-peer way of compensating people, the utility has to get in on the car maker has to get in on it. And it's already happening. Because the car maker is willing to share that information or allow the inverters to be updated. So that energy doesn't just go into the car as it is today. So the inverters have to be bi directional. So the cars have to change a little bit, oftentimes just a software change in the car. It's not a big technical problem. But the way that affects the battery, charge and discharge cycles and the life of the battery, the warranty considerations, all of that sounds like it's a tough problem. But it's not people are already solving it. People like us are already helping merge that auto cloud with the grid cloud and let people consumers have the choice of opting in for that service. Working with their utility, and others.
So while future I'm just as an old utility guy having this conversation, and and listening to what you say, I mean, as a homeowner, to have a have the thought and say, Yeah, but my neighborhoods just part of this cluster. And we're just dandy. And and, and we've, we've contractually put it all together, and now we're tight spinning and moving and doing this. And now look at that man, it's constantly whatever, that is amazing. Reality, and it's going to happen, because I happen like you and others. Because thinking about innovative ways of making power making. I mean, we just take it for granted. We just do. It's just something that that we just do. Now, how do people get ahold of you?
Oh, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Shamik Mehta at LinkedIn, or Shamik dot meta at Hitachivantana.com. And I'll be happy to talk to anybody further about this ad nauseum. I love this space.
Oh, hey, you indicated that you had a couple of slides. Do you think you can offer it up for these fine listeners just as a download a simple demo?
I can. There is Oh, why don't I do one thing? Why don't I send them over to you? And then you can add them to this presentation if you'd like. And that might be the best way I'd rather not share a slide right now. It just makes it seem so dry and pitchy. I'm not that. Good. All right. You got to right there. But we got to ventura.com
Yeah, he spells his name m eh, ta so make sure that meta is how you say it. Sh a m ik is the way he spells his first name shimmy. straightforward. You my friend are rock star. You are. Thanks for having me. This is anonymous right here. All right, listeners. We're gonna have everything out there on industrial talk. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. You're not you're gonna be able to find all the contact information there. So stay tuned. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.
All right, two words. Shamik. Mehta. Hitachi Vantara is the company they are doing great things they are solving problems each and every day. People like Shamika and others on team. Hitachi Vantara pretty much making my life better. I knows that they're gonna make your life better as well. This is a brave new food future. They understand the need to innovate. They understand the need to collaborate, reach out to Shamik on a stack garlin saying LinkedIn Baby, you will not will not be disappointed. All right. As you can see on the video, I'm sort of making sure that people are sharing, not really sharing but just supporting these individuals. So please, please, industrial professionals need your support. They're trying to do everything they can to be to make our lives better. So please, subscribe, follow, do whatever is necessary on the social platforms. As you can see by the video I had that popped up, so go out to industrial talk. Find us out there on all of the platforms. All right, be bold, be brave, daring greatly. You're going to change the world. Thank you very much for joining. We're gonna have another great interview right around the corner.
About the author, Scott
I am Scott MacKenzie, husband, father, and passionate industry educator. From humble beginnings as a lathing contractor and certified journeyman/lineman to an Undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Business Administration, I have applied every aspect of my education and training to lead and influence. I believe in serving and adding value wherever I am called.
