Newsletter 11: Cleaner Transportation and the Applications of Batteries and Hydrogen Technologies
Just Plain Fuelishness
It's me again- missed ya!
I know, too long since the last ‘newsletter.’ C’mon - it was summer! In the last issue (#10 for those that are counting) I said I would cover the lifecycles of the energy transition. Then I realized, isn’t that what we discuss every newsletter? At any rate, since we covered used EV batteries in such depth last time, I decided to step back and look at where we are in this evolution that goes by so many monikers - smart mobility, transportation electrification, eMobility, take your pick. So I started diving further into the transportation transformation, sussing out where we are with charging infrastructure, and what’s happening with V2G activity, plus who’s doing what in terms of EV sales… (captain obvious alert: the story is still mostly Tesla, Tesla, and more Tesla), with a dash of announcements of what’s coming around the bend from the rest of OEMdom... and then I got pulled into hydrogen. If electrons moving vehicles is what defines eMobility, then we gotta take a quick peak at hydrogen as well, just to see where this race may end up in a few decades. Hydrogen’s really early, but there are increasingly some signs...
Undercurrent
Digging out the clams from a ton of mud
Since I cover so much ground in the energy ecosystem, I get asked variations of this question a lot...“Where do you get your information and what’s your routine for compiling such a comprehensive array of material?” Recently I’ve attempted to quantify the data to answer that question.
After one of my four workshops this summer, an attendee asked me what newsletters I read, so I finally put them all in a spreadsheet with fields for subject matter, frequency of publication, my favorites, and the URLs (ask me and I shall send). Turns out I scan/read 22 separate newsletters - most of them daily - a number which somewhat surprised me.
Then I thought it would be an interesting exercise to estimate how many headlines I scan daily - I’m thinking somewhere around 200 to 250 - and how many full length reports I scan/read each week - one week it was five: New York ISO’s Gold Book, New York’s Market Monitor Report, a 2018 summary of fuel cell markets, and NREL’s two new reports on both on- & off-shore wind. The full-length pieces are where I grab many of my best slides (now in the 1000’s) that I sort and organize by topic so I can mix and match for workshops and keynotes. I also have 1275 URLs sorted by my own “system” for search engine optimization (some refer to it as a spreadsheet). Lately, I have begun tracking announcements on storage that highlight a new use case or mark a new milestone, and I’m thinking if I had time (which I don’t) I should do that for blockchain and hydrogen.
The process reminds me of my younger brother’s early career as a clam-digger on Cape Cod: with a long rake and a strong back, he’d rip through a clam-flat at low tide, digging a straight path quickly through dozens of feet of mud, before the tide invaded, pulling out the ‘steamers’ for markets in New York and Boston.
The long and short of it is, I rake through a bunch of stuff each morning, and constantly refine (or in some cases rebut) my various theses by sifting through enough data points to determine where things are going. Then in many cases I try to bring this insight into my Forbes.com articles. Sometimes I review the archive of interviews from 2-6 years ago (I’ve written close to 300 posts to date), and it reads like a who’s-who of many of today’s industry leaders, but written when many were nascent or up-and-comers. In truth, occasionally I meet somebody from a company and think, “now that’s a familiar name,” and then realize I covered them some years ago in a Forbes post (that’s also called ‘getting old.’)
There is a ton of information out there that provides hints as to which way the energy markets are evolving and which scenarios we are approaching, as others recede into the distance. I’m finding that investors like that type of thing. They know what they want to do with this kind of information. (The only time it’s really paid off for me was when I bought Enphase (ENPH) at 97 cents - the bottom - and then forgot about it until it was over $20/share, plus a recent dip into Plug Power (PLUG), after I interviewed CEO Andy Marsh for a Forbes piece and saw the expansion potential. I love working with the financial community, and appreciate referrals to investors looking for insights in this space.
Bright Idea
An electrifying future or ‘why the electron will rule in trains, planes and automobiles - hydrogen/fuel cell vs batteries’
Recently it was 'Climate Week' (I love how we have Climate Week and Earth Day - the rest of the time we can choose to forget them and focus on something else, I guess), so in this newsletter let’s shine a light on transportation since - according to the EPA - it’s the largest U.S. source of greenhouse gas emissions, at 29%. Now that we are making some solid progress in the utility sector and gaining critical momentum, it’s time to focus on transportation and bring the electron into mobility in a big way.
A recent conversation I had with Marsh at Plug Power got me focused on the topic as well and caused me to think about long-term scenarios for transportation. One key question I’m trying to puzzle through: what will this look like in its near-term end state? That is, decades from now, how will batteries and hydrogen (really just another storage medium) drive mobility, and how will technological dominance break down by sector?
It’s complicated, but the answer will probably largely be driven by a few variables: required vehicle range; weight of fuel (batteries or hydrogen - either liquid or compressed); speed of fueling; the cost of the fuel; availability and cost of infrastructure and who gets there first to build it out in the inevitable land grab. It should be noted that sometimes the best tech doesn’t win - it just crowds out the other players so they never get a chance to breathe.
I start with the premise that the internal combustion engine (ICE) is dead - the same premise just reiterated by Daimler in late September when it said it’s not dedicating any more resources to developing fossil-fueled engines. The ICE is ‘dead man walking’ because it should be. It’s dirty, noisy, inefficient, and an enormous threat to climate stability. So then the question is what replaces it in each sector: family-owned passenger vehicles; heavy-duty ride-sharing (autonomous or not); delivery vans; long-haul trucks. And heck, we might as well discuss trains and planes, since there’s movement in those sectors. Location also matters: Japan and parts of Europe are casting their lot with hydrogen a lot earlier than we are in North America.
Be Smart: The case for E-mobility: Although recent sales have turned sluggish in both the U.S. and China (in the U.S. August sales seemed to run out of gas, (yup, we used an outdated metaphor - down over 10,000 units from last August) it’s pretty clear that EVs are in their ascendancy. Reuters reports Ford and GM are finally getting their act together to bring electricity to the shrine of American mobility: the pick-up truck. Tesla and Rivian both have Detroit scared, and Amazon just announced a plan to purchase 100,000 Rivian delivery vans.
These are some of the first signs electrons will increasingly dominate our mobility. Future electric mobility (e-mobility) may be from hydrogen fuel cells or from increasingly lighter, solid-state and more powerful batteries. Regardless, the electron will gain ascendancy for some compelling reasons. And it will not just be limited to cars and trucks: planes and trains are electrifying as well (so the late John Candy would have had no problem making it home on future Thanksgivings), though he might have been glad he wasn’t on the e-plane that crashed in Norway this week, (according to the local press, it was “dramatisk”).
E-mobility is cleaner. Studies show that even with a dirty grid, electric vehicles release fewer emissions than engines that involve direct internal combustion, though of course that advantage varies depending on where you are located, and your local grid mix. Even if you get all perverse on me and pick Wyoming (at 86% coal), my (as yet not on the market) electric F150 would still crush your internal combustion counterpart. Or at least that’s what the Feds say... Meanwhile, the grid keeps getting cleaner, and both battery and fuel cell technologies keep improving, while we’re probably reaching peak efficiency with what we can do with an ICE.
E-mobility vehicles involve fewer moving parts. In the post “Here’s Seven Reasons Why Electric Vehicles Will Kill The Gas Car” (could they not have said “Will Gently Shoulder the Gas Car Aside?”) the author asserts that the drive-train in an ICE incorporates over 2,000 moving parts, compared with approximately 20 in an EV. Tesla claims 17 moving parts vs 200+ in an ICE (note to self: short-sell Genuine Parts Company, NAPA, and AutoZone in about 5 years).
E-mobility will soon become cost-effective on a total cost-of-ownership basis. Which is bad news for oil companies. The latest analysis to look at this issue just came out in August, where BNP Paribas took a look at the comparative cost of mobility, (specifically, for a given amount of invested capital, how much mobility could one buy?) and stated, “Our analysis indicates that for the same capital outlay today, new wind and solar-energy projects, in tandem with battery electric vehicles (EVs) will produce 6x -7x more useful energy at the wheels than will oil at $60/bbl for gasoline-powered vehicles... Accordingly, we calculate that the long-term break-even price for gasoline to remain competitive as a source of mobility is $9-$10/bbl…" And that’s before we even begin to freak out about the fact that July was yet again the hottest month on record and actually decide to do something meaningful about climate change (note to self: short-sell Exxon Mobile, Chevron et al. in fewer than three years. Keep Shell Oil - they actually have plans for this new energy economy and are making some investment bets accordingly).
And e-mobility is quieter (note to self: Go long with an investment in hearing aid companies in the next five years - probably not a bad idea anyway, with an aging population.)
The numbers on the ground for vehicles are not yet overwhelming, especially if you take Tesla out of the picture, but wait...
The last two and a half years have seen considerable growth in EV sales. We climbed from a total 199,800 2017 sales of a car with a plug, to just over 361,300 last year, and are on track this year to exceed that total, with 2019 sales through July at 176,000 compared with 154,000 last year. Take Tesla’s 99,500 sales out of the picture though, and sales are pretty lackluster. So this is still more about promise than it is about reality, especially in the context of annual U.S. car sales that totaled 17.3 million in 2018, meaning that EVs represented only 2% of overall sales. In a place like Houston, TX, Tesla cars make up over 94% of battery electric vehicles on the roads.
At the same time, though, it would be foolhardy to ignore the groundswell of the wave that is building, both in the U.S. and abroad, with signals from an increasing number of automakers that they see change coming. There are about 40 models available in the U.S today, up from a handful five years ago. And they are finally moving out of being smaller compact vehicles to something more of us want to drive.
Many industry leaders are waiting for pickups and SUVs to accommodate modern American consumer habits. For example, Ford has announced it will be releasing an electric F150 and pulled off a neat little stunt in July: its prototype F150 pulled a million pound load of F150s on ten double decker rail cars. Ford also announced a $500 million investment in start-up Rivian in April of this year (Amazon also led a $700 mn round in February - check out their cool pickup truck), with the latest being that they may jointly launch an SUV. Then there’s VW, who just cannot stop talking about its EV platform (they had to do something after being caught with diesel all over their hands) and announced with Ford last month that it will share VW’s MEB platform to increase overall efficiencies. And there’s Volvo, which - like Daimler - has stopped investing entirely in ICE technology.
Thinking of taking off: The number for e-planes is non-existent today, but check out the startup AeroMobil if you have a second to let your mind wander (and remind folks like me of the promise of life in the clouds watching the Jetsons back in the day!)
There are other projects in pilot phase (ZING! yup, I said that). One example is Harbour Air, a Vancouver-based company with 40 seaplanes that intends to go all electric by 2022. All of it relatively short routes involve less than half an hour in the air, so it’s likely doable. And in June, Ampaire flew the biggest hybrid-electric plane to date on its maiden voyage. The company eventually plans to fly between Kahului airport and Hana on the Hawai’ian island of Maui, with a prototype by 2021.
Then there’s Eviation’s ‘Alice’ that debuted at this year’s Paris Air Show and can cover 650 miles at 276 mph. It’s CEO characterized the vehicle as a "huge battery with some plane painted on it." A recent and excellent Greenbiz article highlights a few other major players in the space, where short-haul could be the main market. Battery weight is a huge issue, so don’t expect to see a transcontinental flight anytime soon.
Be Competitive: Hydrogen vs batteries - who wins? It’s not exactly KingKong vs. Godzilla, but if you peer forward hard enough, you do see hydrogen once again raising its ugly head (it’s in the eye of the beholder). Batteries are not the only medium for effectively storing energy. Hydrogen (which in liquid form contains about 80% of the energy in an equivalent volume of gasoline, and stores a lot in compressed form as well) will do just fine. The key, as with any technology on its way to success, is to find that beachhead where one can make a go of it, consolidate resources, refine business models and eventually move inland into other markets.
For hydrogen, the successful beachheads have been in materials handling (another word for warehouses and forklifts). Plug Power’s CEO Andy Marsh indicated that clients like Walmart wanted the fuel cells, but eventually forced Plug into the hydrogen infrastructure game, as they wanted a one-stop shop. Now that Plug has gotten good at it, that expertise is serving the company well as they move into mobility.
The context starts with short-haul fleet vehicles: The next area for hydrogen, Marsh indicates, is serving clean fleets that are constantly in motion and for whom charging represents expensive downtime. Hence their recent contract with manufacturer StreetScooter to serve DHL Deutsche Post with 100 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Per the recent Amazon/Rivian announcement, the hydrogen gang will need to get moving: this space is going to be among the most hotly contested in the near future and may tell us a lot about eventual long-term winners.
After that, Marsh sees potential in long haul trucking, where carrying a bit of extra liquid hydrogen as fuel is a far more efficient alternative to hauling along tons of pounds of batteries in order to get the range one wants (a 40 ton e-truck with about 300 miles of range needs 8 tons of battery).
Long-haul trucking will be next... Switzerland is one place where the hydrogen bet is picking up speed. H2 Mobility Switzerland - a consortium of energy companies and transportation fleet owners - is working to accelerate adoption of clean hydrogen mobility. To that end, in July Switzerland’s first (2 MW) system for the commercial production of hydrogen was announced at the Gösgen hydropower plant. This hydrogen is targeted for the first 50 of an eventual 1,600 fuel cell trucks (by 2025) being supported by Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility, to be driven by members of H2 Mobility.
In this country Nikola (which is creating pure electric and hydrogen trucks) has already signed a contract with Budweiser for up to 800 fuel cell trucks, announcing plans to build in Arizona). In mid-September Nikola announced that Dutch commercial vehicle manufacturer CNH Industrial was taking a $250 million Series D stake in the company, providing $100 mn in cash and an additional $150 mn in services like product development, engineering and the like.
Other H2 applications: Meanwhile, railwaygazette.com (yes, there is such a thing) reported in May that Rhein Main Transport Authority has selected Alstom’s bid to supply and support 27 fuel cell multiple-unit trains, at a cost of close to €500m, that includes 25 years of maintenance and associated hydrogen supply. That’s the world’s largest announced fleet to date. So yeah, H2 is starting to get real in Europe.
Japan and Korea are also focused on developing stronger hydrogen economies. Toyota is still focusing a good deal of effort on hydrogen. This January 2019 interview with Toyota’s main hydrogen man definitely merits reading. It will certainly help the reader to gain a different perspective, and learn a few things as well about H2. It made me think that maybe this will happen sooner than most people believe.
Hydrogen may also find a role in air travel as well. In August, California-based aviation start-up ZeroAvia announced a prototype hydrogen plane with a 2-ton take-off weight that can carry six, currently the world’s largest zero-emission aircraft. Its initial market is smaller planes of 10-20 seats with routes up to 500 miles. So it will be a while, but change appears to be in the offing for the aviation industry.
It’s also worth noting that the 2020 Tokyo Olympic torch will be fed with hydrogen, part of Japan’s campaign to make the country “a world-leading hydrogen-based society.”
Fueling- Is it the dinosaur or the egg? I’ve always found the chicken-and-egg argument to be inartful, since we all know that dinosaurs preceded the chicken by at least a few decades. Thus, any “and-egg” uncertainty would have started with dinosaurs. But I digress. A key issue for e-mobility - whether fuel cells or EVs - has to do with the charging infrastructure. It’s one reason Plug Power had to jump into the game and supply the fuel cell forklifts AND the hydrogen infrastructure: there was nobody else to do it for them.
Let’s take the most advanced U.S. state for hydrogen, which of course would be California. A search on the California Fuel Cell Partnership site in mid-August shows 63 fueling sites - almost all concentrated in LA and San Francisco. Of that number, 23 were still in development. According to the DOE, all of the U.S. hydrogen stations are in California. US H2 vehicle sales numbers to date are not inspiring, with just 2,300 models (mainly Toyota Mirai, at 1700) sold in 2018. Then there was that inconvenient issue of a June explosion at the Bay Area facility that supplies H2 to northern CA. That issue has left the limited hydrogen infrastructure in northern California bereft of fuel this summer, so folks with Mirais have had expensive paperweights. As of last month, this still had not been resolved. And at this point, EVs may have beaten hydrogen-electric vehicles to the punch, so that they simply have a harder time catching up.
But even with EVs, the infrastructure issue remains a problem, with insufficient charging stations to alleviate range anxiety at this date. Not so in the UK (being a smaller island country helps), where the number of electric chargers now outweighs that of gas stations. 9,300 to 8,400. Here in this country, the DOE puts the number of charging stations at just under 22,500, with almost 3,100 fast charge stations, compared to some 168,000 gas stations. There’s a way to go, but if one thinks of the progress made in just the past several years, there’s considerable room for optimism.
As many folks know, there are a whole host of issues related to charging protocols (not all chargers fit all cars), charging speed, and locations. There’s insufficient time to get into all of those now, but a few facts to make on scratch one’s head: there is an ABB charger at a Home Depot in Chicopee Massachusetts that can charge an EV at 350 kW. Today, no EV can take even half that at present (that’s the peak demand of a decent sized grocery store), but it gives one an idea of what may be coming. There’s still a problem with charging station profitability, since utilities typically levy a demand charge based on peak monthly demand, which can be steroidal in the case of a technology specifically designed to dump loads of juice within short timeframes.
Battery-electric trucks may also require enormous charging capabilities. (if they can get out ahead of hydrogen). In my January conversation with Julie Blunden, EVP for Business Development at fleet charging company EVGo, she forecast single charging units for trucks as large as 4.5 MW. So your future FlyingJ truck stop - with dozens of truck chargers - would either need to generate power on-site or have a massive intermediate battery array to support the demand. Build-out of the transmission/distribution infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive compared with generating or storing large quantities on-site. EVGo is in the early stages of testing various battery configurations that sit between it and the grid, at this stage, largely to minimize costly demand charges. However, as demand grows, these will likely take on larger configurations.
Swiss Family Drives in One (Tesla, That Is): By the way, it’s not as hard getting across the country in an EV as it used to be. A Swiss family just set a new record for crossing the country in an EV (a Model 3) in 48 hours and 10 minutes. (I watched the first three minutes of the 12:51 time-elapsed video; and left it on in the background while writing. Don’t make my mistake! The music will hurt your head for hours afterwards).
On an only partially related note, perhaps my favorite headline of 2018 was “Nikola Sues Tesla.” I wish the man had lived to see it...
Cyber Security Updates
The never-ending story and what's getting done
In early August, security firm ProofPoint warned that it had detected a ‘phishing” effort focused on three un-named U.S. utilities. The trick this time was to impersonate the U.S. National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, with the emails using “member ID numbers and the signature block of a fictitious employee at NCEES.” Proofpoint provided screenshots of the emails, copies of code fragments, and commented, “The profile of this campaign is indicative of specific risk to US-based entities in the utilities sector.”
Some called it a warning shot or first physical attack. NERC Update w/r/t the March 2019 Cyber Incident at a Western U.S. Utility: In mid-September, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released a “Lessons Learned” document highlighting certain details about the March 5th incident that caused a western utility to lose visibility into part of its operating system. While no generation or transmission/distribution activities were affected, the incident nonetheless raised concerns.
NERC stated, “A vulnerability in the web interface of a vendor’s firewall was exploited, allowing an unauthenticated attacker to cause unexpected reboots of the devices.” This occurred at a “low-impact control center and multiple remote low-impact generation sites,” resulting in repeated interruptions in communications “between field devices at sites and between the sites and the control center.” The firewall reboots lasted over ten hours with each firewall offline for less than five minutes at a time. These outages occurred at the internet-facing firewalls - reaffirming what we have known for a long time: every connection to the Internet represents another potential “attack surface.”
After the fact, the firewall manufacturer developed a firmware update for immediate deployment, which was installed after some on-site assessment. NERC highlighted a few recommendations, including (among them): following industry practices for software patch management; limiting attack surfaces (mainly device connections to the Internet); use of virtual private networks; whitelisting (pre-approving) expected IP addresses.
But Why: A good description of this incident, and somewhat skeptical appraisal is offered in a blog post by Nathan Wallace of GridIntel, a company in the “distribution of intelligent software tools and solutions for the power industry.” Wallace comments “ If I were a betting man, my money would be on a bot or a script kiddie* that carried out the attack,” in which the focus was on the software vulnerability rather than the grid. In fact, he postulates “it is highly unlikely that the bot or attacker knew that it was targeting a power grid asset owner.”
*”According to Techopedia, “A script kiddie is a derogatory term used to refer to non-serious hackers who are believed to reject the ethical principles held by professional hackers.”
Cyber Update: the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners just released two documents to help commissioners better evaluate utility practices, state of readiness, and (of course) prudence of expenditures.
My Recent Personal Experience: You Can’t Be Too Careful, or Paranoid: On August 28th, I got an email from a former colleague and valued client, with a link to click on a fax. There was no contextual info, so I emailed back: Spam? BTW - I hope you had a great summer…
The response back: Yes pls review. Thanks!
Being a bit paranoid, but not wanting to offend, I wrote: Sorry to respond one more time. I actually got a spam that had an auto follow up. Can you pls provide an indicator that you are a person and not a machine? ;-). Like an answer to the following Q: Who is President of the U.S?
I figured this request would fool any machine involved, and here was the response: Lol Peter please review detailed Proposal. Of course Mr. Trump! Thank you!
So I responded: OK - you passed!! Now I am laughing. Will have a look. Not happy with your answer, though (but that’s just me!) -PKD
To which I received a response: Lol Thank you!
I figured he had passed the test (in retrospect, I should have asked him the name of a former employee we both disliked, or something personal), and clicked on the link, which took me into Microsoft, where luckily I do not operate (Apple guy) and had a devil of a time with passwords and other nonsense.
So I emailed back: I clicked on the fax, which put me into MS Office (after password hell) and when I finally got into MS, there didn’t appear to be a document. Any other way to send the file? Sorry. PKD
And the response was: Hi Peter, Sorry about that. Will send as PDF attachment. Thanks!
Next morning, I got an email from my colleague: Malware!! Do not open - sorry bud. I got hacked so went out to everyone out there. Hope all is well
Moral of the story? There is somebody behind these hacks who may actually proactively respond to you. I should have posed a better verification question that would have proven beyond a doubt who I was dealing with. I ran a scan on my Mac that did not reveal any malware. And I don’t work in the Microsoft operating platform, but who knows how I may have been compromised.
Who’s responsible for ensuring this isn’t the Wild West? Is it the shared services?
Where In the World is PKD?
On stage in a city near you
More airplanes (though none powered by electrons)! Since the last newsletter, I got to emcee (and offer my 3-hour workshop) at the TREIA GridNEXT event in San Antonio in June. I love that group and have now participated in that event for three years. We’ve got another one planned for November in Dallas over the past four weeks, I’ve run three battery storage courses (Toronto - mostly to utility and ISO personnel; New York - largely utility staff gearing up for applicants chasing over $300 mn in subsidies and a target of 3 GW; and FERC staff - general background for staff members from other departments). I love the in-house training in particular, you cannot beat the economics. Which means more people can get access to a common level of understanding.
I also had a recent opportunity that was a true pleasure: keynoting at the Constellation Executive Energy Forum in Boston. It was so much fun to meet former colleagues who still worked at the company, as well as numerous “Ex-Conns” who had moved on to other areas in electricity, but came back to attend the event. It reminded me of the tremendous talent and passion of people I worked with for over a decade.
Coming up in Oct, we've got keynotes for APPA in New Orleans and San Antonio, Central Municipal Power Agency Services in Minnesota, and then some conference workshops.
At all of these events, I am seeing a common theme: curious and committed professionals who are eager to embrace the future, and not afraid of the change we are all a part of. I’m also seeing a sense of pleasant surprise at how quickly things are moving, tempered by an understanding of the need to move even more quickly if we are to stave off the worst potential impacts of a changing climate.
Gather 'round the Watercooler
Voice of the audience
How it all fits together and where we’re headed: Back when I worked at Constellation, I eventually ended up with the delightful task of teaching Electricity 101 to new employees during their on-boarding program. My job was to explain how the competitive power industry worked and why each new hire’s job mattered to the entire enterprise (in other words, The Why). Then we would all go off to drinks, dinner, and more drinks (the things my liver did for that company).
In the past month, with all these trainings, it occurs to me that now more than ever - with more specialization, fractured knowledge base, and pace of change - setting common baselines and frames of reference are more important than ever. Recent attendees to my classes on Grid Evolution and Energy Storage have come from multiple utilities, research institutions such as EPRI, and the FERC. They all know way more about their subject matter than I ever could hope to. But they all value the ability to contextualize their knowledge within the framework of a bigger picture as part of this huge and critical journey we are embarked upon. The cohesive narrative - the WHY - becomes increasingly critical in a specialized world.
So - a less than subtle plug - if you have a training budget for this year or are planning one for next, I’m happy to work with you to create a cost-effective presentation that I can confidently state will educate, engage, and entertain the attendees. I can also do something shorter, like the keynotes I am giving for various clients this fall. One of my client contacts who coordinated a speech of mine last year in New York commented on LinkedIn recently that “your keynote (on customer service in the future) was talked about for months after.” (Guess they didn’t have anything better to do ;-)
'til next time...
I'll be over here workin' on this and that
There are a few Forbes things I just finished: a very large sonnen virtual power plant from Down Under that sets a new bar; a look back on ten years of solar innovation (based on PVEL’s CEO Jenya Medbray, whom I last interviewed six years ago!); and a review of trends in the resi solar industry (a result of a conversation with EnergySage’s CEO Vikram Aggarwal - he and I last collaborated on a post four years ago). Fortunately, they still take my calls…
Meanwhile, my book is still in sales mode (my agent told me publishers take the summer off, so we are bearing down now that the weather is cooling).
And oh, yeah - if you have something to share or want that spreadsheet I mentioned, just shoot me an email. You know the address...