Good morning Grid Connections listeners and welcome back to another episode.
In case you may have not listened this Grid Connections podcast is where we
explore the innovations and mind shaping the future of energy, transportation and
sustainability.
Today we're excited to have a very special guest, Yakov Berenshteyn the director of
partnerships at Gridweave.
a pioneering company at the forefront of integrating renewable energy into our
everyday lives.
In this episode, Yakov will share insights into how GridWeave is transforming the
energy landscape through strategic partnerships and cutting -edge technology.
We'll dive into the challenges and opportunities of creating a more
sustainable and efficient grid while tying the needs of electric vehicles to a smart
and much more efficient way of making clean transportation possible, the impact
of digitalization on energy consumption,
and what the future holds for renewable energy integration.
But first, while I was recording this episode yesterday, Yakov mentioned there
would be a big announcement with an auto OEM, and so I'm excited that I can be one
of the first to share the press release with you now.
Weave Grid and Toyota is announcing a partnership that empowers Toyota drivers
to save money while charging their vehicles at home and to contribute to a
cleaner, more resilient electric grid.
In 2023 Toyota sold over 54 ,000 plug -in electric cars in the U .S.
including 14 ,715 all electric and almost 40 ,000 plug -in hybrids.
The Weave Grid and Toyota partnership leverages Weave Grid's intelligent
software platform in concert with the telematic systems on Toyota's electric
vehicles to provide actionable EV load management capabilities to the country's
largest electric utilities as well as allowing
Toyota EV drivers to save money on their utility bill.
So why is this important?
You may be asking.
Partnerships like these help the adoption of EVs by allowing drivers to save money
while charging their vehicle.
This partnership also helps utilities work closely with automakers to manage the load
on the grid, which we'll be discussing quite a bit today.
So I'm really excited to share this with you, along with just some of the general
perspectives that Yakov was able to share around some of the challenges and
misperceptions.
that his company has seen from both the utility on the automaker side and in some
of the ways that their technology addresses those.
So whether you're a professional in the energy sector, a technology enthusiast, or
someone passionate about sustainability, this conversation promises to be a very
valuable perspective on how we can collectively move forward towards a much
greener and more efficient future.
And if you find today's discussion as enlightening as we do, we have a small but
impactful request.
Please share the episode with at least one other listener you think would enjoy it.
Spreading the word helps us connect with more like -minded individuals and really
helps to grow this podcast and what we can do for our listeners such as yourselves.
So let's see how Gridweave is connecting the dots on the energy grid today with
their director of partnerships, Yakov Berenshteyn With that,
Enjoy!
thanks, Chase.
I'm the director of automotive and charging partnerships for a company called
WeaveGrid.
We're about an 85 person company out of San Francisco.
And while our mission kind of in the biggest picture is to help decarbonize
transportation, what we specifically do is we've created a software platform that
sits between the electric utilities on which people are now charging their many
new EVs.
And on the other hand, on the other side, the automakers and some of the charging
hardware providers whose data and controls are enabling us to deliver a new set of
grid services that are of value to the utilities, to the automakers, to the
charging providers, and of course, the drivers who sit in the middle of it all.
And I'm kind of curious, how did you get involved with this?
How did you get connected to electric vehicles?
Was this purely kind of a job opportunity?
Was it just an interest in the space?
Yeah, it's sort of a, you know, one of those circuitous stories where in
retrospect, it's a combination of right place, right time, right friends, I guess.
I am admittedly not a car guy per se, but I am sort of a generalist whose pretty
much my whole career has been the intersection of environmental
sustainability, clean technology, and business.
And so, you know, previous gigs have
been around consulting to corporates on new innovations and technologies for
utilities in the industrial sector.
I helped a large utility pour a bunch of money into residential solar back in the
day, hopped over to a fleet telematics oriented company out of grad school, and
then sort of, you know, right place, right time with the right connections found out
about this 10 person company peak COVID pandemic, spring 2020.
and thought to myself, well, you know, the world's going to hell in hand baskets.
Why not join a 10 person startup?
What's the worst that could happen?
Um, lo and behold, uh, almost four years later, still, still enjoying it.
Companies grown, uh, eight or nine X and sort of head counts, uh, have raised $50
million and, um, I've gotten to play a few different roles and have enjoyed every day
of it so far.
That's great.
And I think this is a great thing to kind of be discussing because even though
lately I feel like our focus really has been around electric vehicles and electric
vehicle charging, the name of the podcast is Great Connection.
So there is obviously a large focus on how this ties the grid, how it kind of helps
to enable better use of cleaner energy to be then kind of being the background.
with this transportation revolution.
And so that was part of the reason I was excited to have you on today.
And I realize, even though, like you're saying, your background might not be, I
think we're gonna be talking a lot of these different areas that I know I will
be and quite a few of the listeners will be interested in.
So let's kind of jump into it then.
With partnerships at WeaveGrid, where do companies kind of come to interact with
you most commonly?
Is it?
As an EV manufacturer, is it a utility or what does that look like?
Yeah, so it's interesting.
We've really created this two-sided platform that's growing on both sides.
One is the electric utilities, the other is the car companies and the charger
companies.
Our initial client base has been the electric utilities.
So the US super fragmented in its electric utilities.
There's about 3,000 of them.
Many of those are tiny co-ops, so we'll put them
What's happening with them is they're seeing EV adoption take off.
Of course, it's very clustered and inconsistent from state to state,
geography to geography.
But this is really starting to strain their local electric distribution grids in
particular.
And so they're looking to solutions like ours to help them optimize the charging
loads on those networks.
And then on the flip side, the way we...
optimize those charging loads on the networks is we tap into the data and
controls that are streaming either from the EVs themselves.
So when you think sort of software defined vehicle, EV telematics, there's a lot of
buzzwords, but we are very much tapping into kind of like the real deal data and
controls on vehicles.
We're also tapping into that with the EVSC, the silly acronym on what which
really just means chargers.
And so we're able to provide sort of this agnostic platform to utilities where they
can tap into this range of devices and vehicles for those grid services.
But then those automakers and charging companies are also coming to us and
saying, okay, so WeaveGrid helps connect our vehicles, our drivers to the grid in
this sort of new participatory fashion.
We want to have grid interactive vehicles as well.
We want to get into the sort of eventual
bidirectional game of backup power and export to the grid, help us figure out the
crawl lock run to get there.
And so kind of where my role has kind of even shifted a little bit in the last 18
months is going from, hey, automaker, do you want to work with us to sort of
support these utility programs to, hey, it sounds like you actually want to go.
bigger, you actually want to not do this as like a one-off here and there with a
couple utilities, but you really want the future of your electric vehicles to be
grid interactive.
Like Weave Grid's built up the sort of know-how and capability to help you design
for that.
And so now we're on one side, this utility software on the other side, this sort of
OEM facing software and almost technical advisory kind of service.
Yeah, that's really interesting because one of the things I think we've discussed
with quite a few guests lately is over, I would say definitely just over the course
of 2023, but especially in the last six months, so many of these technologies that
have been hyped up around whether it was autonomy or especially kind of a vehicle
to grid.
There's definitely been a lot of kind of taking some steps back and maybe it's
reality and obviously the markets and a bit, a lot of different changes that have
kind of impacted.
Uh, the announcements versus the reality.
And there are still quite a few players that are serious about it and do see the
long-term need, and that is just where it seems like a lot of things are going.
But I would be kind of curious if you could just walk us through what does the
crawl walk, run approach for that kind of transition for vehicle to grid and the
adoption of these utilities to implement that.
Sure, yeah.
I'll touch on that.
And I'll first caveat that WeaveGrid today is very centrally focused on the home
charging experience for consumers.
That is of course one segment.
There are things like Explorations, other companies, and a little bit of us as well
doing things like depot charging for heavy duty vehicles.
Totally different paradigm of charging needs and impacts on the grid.
So for the sake of like focusing this.
conversation a little bit, I'll touch on sort of what's happening and that consumer
comes home with their first EV, wants to know how to charge in their garage or in
their parking spot and the utility needs to do something about that.
The sort of initial crawl in a lot of cases has been utilities just better
understanding where that charging is happening, where it's clustering, what
kind of peak loads are being hit at that sort of granular level down to the...
address, but then also aggregate it up to a service transformer on the grid or a
feeder or a zip code.
So just starting to understand those hotspots.
That's kind of like the crawl.
And the way we can do that is just by using telemetry on vehicles and devices to
understand that aggregated picture and show utility, hey, here are where your
hotspots are.
You can now plug that into sort of forecasting and operational management
tools that you have.
The next level is then, okay.
So we know where we're starting to get these hotspots.
We know, you know, we being either WeaveGrid or the utility or both together
know, hey, you know, we have a pretty outdated hardware, electrical hardware out
in that hotspot.
How do we manage around that?
The first level is sort of behavioral nudges and points of engagement to
drivers.
Utilities typically do that through rates, right?
You set a time of use rate that says,
Hey, please charge after 9 p.m.
off peak window.
You'll save some money.
And that goes a pretty good distance to sort of offset those peak loads and other
constraints.
But of course you also get the secondary effects like, all right, you told everyone
to start charging at 9 p.m.
Guess what?
Everyone's charging at 9 p.m.
now.
The power plants are fine now.
We're not gonna run out of power, but the local grid at the, you know, kind of the,
again, the transformer at the end of your cul-de-sac, now that that...
Neighborhood has seven EVs in it.
That's where you start to get that hyperlocal strain.
And so the next step up is actually actively manage charging.
So we get opt-in and consents from the driver and design a program with utilities
such that they can actually automate the charging on behalf of the driver.
So it's a very sort of set it and forget it kind of mentality.
You plug in at night, the charging might not start right away.
Interesting.
designed to make sure that you, the driver, get the charge you need that you
specified by the time you wake up and use your car in the morning.
But it's co-optimized with the local grid constraints, the bulk utility system
constraints, as well as other drivers in your respected region of aggregation.
There's additional layers of complexity here.
for sure.
the, yeah, the pinnacle is really around solving for the distribution challenge.
And that's where we have some patented IP on algorithms that solve for that really,
really nuanced electric distribution challenge relative to EVs.
And so that's kind of the North Star, and that's where our most progressive and
innovative utility clients are starting to push things.
Yeah, that's a really interesting use case.
And that kind of makes sense.
Just, I guess to use a hypothetical, if you have 10 different people in a
cul-de-sac who are charging their EVs and maybe one's like a really efficient small,
like a Tesla Model 3 or something.
And then someone has like a Hummer EV that's gonna take all night to charge,
your system can kind of actively move around, which does it get to that level?
I mean, when you talk about complexity of like,
where the car needs to be and the battery pack and all sorts of different kind of
variables like that.
Short answer.
Yes, it's moving, you know in a more sophisticated direction over time.
One thing that's interesting and not yet sort of fully fleshed out in the sort of
utility you kind of program paradigms or regulations is What what is the sort of
you know, there's some like philosophical questions that end up being debated
through sort of the legal
happenings of public utility commissions and so on, but it's like, okay, so to your
point, there's a small little EV and there's a big, big EV.
Does big EV have preference over the small EV because they need more charge in terms
of who charges first?
What about when you go bidirectional?
Clearly the big EV has more potential to feed power back to...
the grid, should they be compensated more by the utility in a bidirectional
paradigm?
Or is that then inequitable because you're just rewarding the person that can afford
the bigger car?
These are questions that have not yet been fully settled yet, even like they've been
addressed in some forums, but we're far from a full picture as to what that's
going to look like in the next 10 years.
Yeah, that is an interesting point, but I could also see those interests being very,
I think with a lot of the stuff we're talking about regionally focused.
Uh, and I, I'm kind of curious when you talk about the crawl walk, run approach, a
lot of the stuff you talked about in the crawl phase seems like a big part.
It's data driven, but a big part is that education piece.
And do you find that, um, if you can share this, is that.
Education being seeked out by the utility, like coming to you to ask those questions,
or is it a pretty big, like you have to reach out to them, show that this is the
solution you're solving for, and this is kind of the data and the demand from your
user base or, uh, energy providers to actually go down the path and make those
changes or to, to make the question even longer, is that also very regionally
based?
Yeah, I wish I had, you know, I think the answer that a lot of folks expect in to
that question is like, oh, it's all about California first and everyone else later.
That's actually not how we've seen it play out per se.
Certainly, I remember like four years ago, some of our sort of like business
development conversations with utilities with someone in Idaho or Ohio is a little
bit like, hey, don't you want this to track where...
EV hotspots are happening and they're like, I can't imagine there's EV hotspots.
Like I saw my first, you know, Tesla, uh, three months ago and I haven't seen one
since.
Um, so there definitely were those types of conversations.
Those are now starting to evolve where those utilities are coming to us and
saying, Oh, yep, now that we have a little bit more mass adoption, um, we're
interested in this problem, of course.
Um, within a given utility, um, you know, like a hypothetical utility and like the
Midwest.
There might be a central mid-sized city to that utility and then a lot of suburban or
mostly rural outskirts.
Of course, it's that one or two suburbs to that mid-sized city where all the EVs are.
While they don't represent the kind of growth you see in California, they do
represent the same like, oops, the local grid was not designed for...
this home or this cul-de-sac, this neighborhood, to have this many EVs.
I'll say, yeah, the other interesting thing is, of course, there is variability
by policy developments at a state-by-state level.
The public utility commissions are all run at the state level, so you get this, yeah,
just kind of variability across the country.
But...
Again, going back to the question you didn't ask of, is this all about
California?
Actually, our flagship utility client has been Baltimore Gas and Electric in
Maryland.
The combination of, I think, innovative policy at the state level and focus on
transportation electrification with the local demographics, the...
the ages and the incomes and the population types that are most likely to
buy EVs, we're all kind of concentrated there in the last three or four years.
And we've had this great utility partner with whom we started on relatively basic
implementations.
And then every step of the way, they've been this great partner of, okay, what's
next?
We've done this thing with Weaver for a year on sort of passive engagement of
drivers.
We now have a bunch more EVs than when we started.
What do we do next?
Okay, let's go like really active managed charging.
Okay, 12 months, goodbye, 18 months, goodbye.
What's next?
We have a ton more EVs than 18 months ago and we've gotten into increasingly
sophisticated deployments with them.
So that's been just like a great paradigm for us to copy in other utilities since
then.
For sure.
And I'm kind of curious, can you share when you're talking about that crawl,
walk, run approach, I've definitely worked with some clients where they're really
fun, but they are pushing kind of the limits of what the technology is able to
do.
And then that fortunately does unlock greater products that you can kind of then
obviously productize further and sell to other clients, but can you share kind of
any of the maybe upcoming products that you're excited for in this year that we've
grid is working on that's kind of being pushed in that direction?
Oh, good question.
What can I share?
Well, I can answer it from maybe two fronts.
One is the sort of depth of utility sophistication, right?
So I talked about our sort of real sort of North Star focus on the distribution
system and some of the patented IP we have.
We're just continuing to have more, both pilot and full-scale deployments of that
technology coming up with some of our utility partners.
we, you know, the whole world is now looking at the whole world, the whole
industry is starting to look more of that bi-directional capability.
There, as far as I know, for that, for the residential space, there is effectively
nowhere in the country that is actually compensating drivers at any scale to
export, but there are a number of pilots and grant opportunities, a couple of which
are
still in the running, a few of which that we've already been selected for that will
start to go into deployments closer to mid this year.
So we're excited for that.
The other piece, and really kind of the focus of my specific role is the types of,
again, automotive and charging partners that we're bringing into the fold.
We've been quietly, I'll say, working with a couple of the largest automakers in the
world.
They...
unlike utilities who aren't competitive with one another, the automakers are
pretty conservative in letting us talk about them.
But I believe as soon as tomorrow, we're issuing a press release about some of the
work we've been doing with one of the large automakers.
So that's pretty exciting.
And that's gonna be kind of, I think a continuous drip going forward of some of
the partners that we've been able to bring on board.
And, you know, one thing that I sort of love about WeaveGrid is, well,
the love and hate, the automakers are conservative in letting us announce
things, but once we do, it's because we've already been working with them for six,
12, 18 months or more, and have sort of gained their trust as sort of a thought
partner and an advisor.
So once they're ready to announce our partnership, that means we're already
pretty locked in, and yeah, more great things to come over the coming months.
Yeah, and that does kind of make sense just when you look at also the product
roadmap and kind of product development for a lot of cars, especially electric
vehicles.
And there's really only a few currently available to the market that actually even
offer a kind of a vehicle to grid system.
So I, that kind of makes sense that the interest and as well as the announcements
would probably be waiting on either new cars or once some of these even, uh, early
versions of the
power sharing technology or vehicle to grid technologies become more, uh, should
I say tested?
Uh, and, and even in the public.
So I'm kind of curious though with what are, can you share maybe some of the
misperceptions that an auto, like a, an automaker would have about the need for
offering vehicle to grid or any kind of, um, just even general pushback.
You usually see them may be well intended by the automaker, but is a misperception
about the reality.
Yeah, I mean, I'd say it's like probably two themes come to mind.
One is kind of that leap to the bidirectional side, right?
Like it generates a lot of buzz, has some really interesting applications in the
future.
But I think a few automakers have sort of accidentally taken a step too far when
they've come out with announcements like,
bi-directional capable vehicle, you can power your home and sell electricity back
to the grid and, frankly, cut the big bad utility out of the picture and make money.
And you're like, well, first of all, that doesn't really make sense because to get
the electricity in your car, you must have purchased it from the utility.
So it's not like you're really going off grid.
But then also it turns out there are some really, I'd say, onerous, sticky...
requirements for things like electrical interconnection.
So if you are actually going to be sort of a quote unquote power generator, um,
feeding electricity back into the grid, there's some very stringent, um, sort of
electrical engineering standards and permitting standards that you have to, uh,
complete.
And I think some of the automakers kind of discovered, Oh, telling our, you know,
customers that they can just like buy this and do this kind of missed the mark on
actually the, the steps involved.
Um, and so all that is to say, I think, you know, going back to the, the crawl
walk run, I think the, there's been the perception of, okay, like we got to get
into the V2G game.
And we're sort of here to say, like, actually there's value to be generated.
Uh, in what, you know, has been kind of colloquially called V1G, just one
directional management, which is, you know, our, our types of programs on
whether it's behavioral or actively pushing charge schedules, um,
optimized to the given vehicle, you can do a lot and gain a lot of the grid value,
not by exporting power, but just by managing how it's consumed in the first
place.
I think the other related theme or misperception, I think, is some not going
to bad mouth any OEMs here who are all my friends and prospective partners, but a
little bit of...
misconception they might have had about how to interface with the utility grid.
There were pilots in this space as early as 10 years ago, and some automakers did
them directly with utilities, and that's great.
That was very innovative for the time.
And now that we're in this sort of scale-up era, I don't believe that a given
automaker is going to have sort of the...
the time or the in-house capabilities to run a fully scaled EV program with a given
utility, let alone all 3000 in the country.
So I do think this is like a many to many problem that a platform provider, you
know, I'm biased here because we're the platform provider, but this is where I
think this is why services and software platforms like us exist.
It's like, Hey, oh yeah, do you want to hire 100 people to do this yourself?
Maybe, but
utilities don't want the single automaker solution.
They also want the agnostic platform.
So that's where I think we could sort of bring scale to both sides of the equation.
Well, that, that does make a lot of sense.
It kind of goes back to what we were talking about with just, uh, not even the
pullback from some auto makers in the technologies that they were more bullish
about, but just kind of reality setting in as far as what that will actually take to
execute upon that.
And I think the VDG is one of those big ones that really did sound really great in
concept and still obviously longer term we'll get there, but I know there were
just a lot of people that.
went in and bought cars because they knew they could do that, whether they had a
cabin or something else that they wanted to kind of make their house more off grid
only to realize that, yeah, it might be $12,000 or so in panel upgrades because
they have an older home or all these kind of other, uh, well intended, but
unforeseen costs that kind of go into that.
And it, and in a lot of ways it's no different than if you do install like a
diesel generator, you have to do a lot of this stuff anyway, too.
Uh, cause in a way, that's really at least how the grid kind of sees it.
is that sort of new area of power kind of coming onto the grid and having how to
manage that and avoid islanding issues that can happen.
So that's really fascinating to hear those misperceptions from the automaker side.
Are there any from the utility side that you can share?
Yeah, I'll say earlier in my role at WeaveGrid, I did interface with the
utilities a lot more and not as much recently as I spend more time with the
automakers.
But I will say one thing, I think, or one, I don't know if it's like a misconception
or just like a lack of awareness maybe that I perceive from the utilities is
there's sort of this underlying belief that...
the data that's being produced by the vehicles is somehow readily available and
should be, I don't know, free and standardized to, you know, the consumption
of whatever purpose the utility might have.
And I think, and I don't think this is something that utilities sort of just
decided or individuals working for utilities kind of decided on their own.
It's that
competitors that I don't know if you used Napster in its two-year existence in your
teenage years like I did, but there's a very interesting analog happening now to
where like, yeah, Napster, you can download all this music and as far as you
can tell, it was what's the difference between bits and bytes packaged in your
MP3 versus the bits and bytes that came off the properly copyrighted CD if they
sound the same?
And so there's companies in our space today that are, you know, effectively
ripping off the data from the EVs and sort of the very Napster, Limewire, whatever
service analogy you might use from the pre-music streaming era.
And so utilities have come to believe that like, oh, all this data is readily
available and I could get it for close to free through a middleman that sort of
scrapes this data from the OEMs.
The OEMs are mad.
They're kind of like the...
Yeah.
And, you know, as you may, again, I'll keep to sort of maybe beating the Napster
horse to death here.
But eventually the Recording Industry Association of America, with all their
lobbying and political power, went to, I don't know, it didn't get to the Supreme
Court, but it got pretty high against Napster.
And what are we seeing today?
Well, one of the large international automakers is suing one of those sort of
data scraping providers.
And at the same time, our, some of our utility friends that maybe previously
said, oh, you know, like, we're not really looking for the highest end solution here.
We're looking for just like the minimum viable product that gets me all the
automakers data.
They're kind of getting what they paid for and getting their wrists slapped by
regulators.
Now the public utility commission regulators who are saying like, hey,
either this data is being blocked.
where it's of low quality, it's not actually enabling the services that the
utility said you were getting from the vendors you've contracted with.
And so Weaver has been in the behind the scenes here, or not behind the scenes, but
a little bit in the background saying, hey, we told you this was going to be a
slow and steady wins the race.
So again, who's winning the streaming?
music streaming capabilities now.
It's the iTunes and Spotify's of the world who, whether you like them or not, did it
the sort of legally sound and partnered away with all the music labels.
That's kind of what we're doing.
We're not trying to be the sketchy Silicon Valley startup that causes a blackout when
you hack into all the cars where we're doing this with cybersecurity in mind,
sort of legal and technical contracts in mind and trying to do the right thing
here.
Hehehehe
Hehehe
I will say I'm not sure.
There's a few standards out there for various components of the overall kind of
end-to-end communications chain, like ISO 15118 about communication of sort of
vehicle and charger data between one another.
I'm not sure how they're gonna shake out and practice because yeah, something I've
kind of seen over my couple of years in this space is there's a few really smart
academic folks who are, again, like I don't mean that in any kind of bad way, I
mean that in a very genuine way.
They're very smart people, but their academic nature leads them to focus in on
like the standards.
and solve so hard for the standards that they don't solve for just getting stuff
done.
And so what ends up happening is, in our case, we work with a lot of custom API
developments between us and our partners, instead of through standards that may or
may not exist yet or recover the full picture.
Three years goes by, the academics publish an update of version 3.7 of the standard.
By the time they've done that, like...
the sort of more practical approach of just getting stuff done via custom APIs
has taken hold and is it good or bad for the industry if there's more custom APIs
versus standards or custom communications protocols versus standards?
We'll see how it shakes
where do you gaps right now in the electric vehicle and the electric vehicle
charging space and are any of those gaps areas that WeaveGrid is really focused on
really filling currently?
Oh man, there's a lot of gaps.
I think as you spoke about on your last episode with John Volcker about sort of
the IONNA charging network, things like that are gonna continue to fill some of
those gaps in both real charging needs and also driver perception.
I think one that has been a little bit outside of our-
her view, but we're starting to touch a little bit is the dealership, right?
It's really funny seeing the mix of reactions we get from our utility clients
or automotive partners when we mentioned the need to touch the dealerships.
Some are like, yes, of course, like that's the missing piece.
Some are like, oh, God, like why would you want to get involved in that racket?
But I think as we launch more of these utility programs across the country, it's
only helpful if people actually enroll in them.
And so we have a number of different touch points we use, both through the utility,
through our own driver engagement to marketing and through the OEM's own apps
to engage the drivers to get them to enroll and participate in these programs.
But the education piece, I think, at the dealership is still missing.
And so I think what we're...
just starting to scrape at the surface of with a couple of our partners is as we
launch a new utility program in a given geography like let's say in Colorado Can
we Go through their dealer training and education channels to make sure at point
of sale the driver knows.
Hey Congrats, you live in Colorado and guess what?
When you buy this vehicle, it's automatically eligible for this program
called
Charging perks, which is just the name for Excel Energy Colorado, the program we run
with them, and just getting that automatic insight of like, yeah, you could be
charging with excess wind power overnight and making an extra, you know, 50, 100,
150 bucks in utility incentives when you drive off the lot today.
And it's like, cool.
I wasn't sure if that whole renewable energy thing was a gimmick or not, but
sounds like this is a real and I get.
to earn a few bucks by doing it, like great.
Like if your dealer is educated on that, I think we can, it's not the thousands of
dollars off the hood of the car that federal incentives are providing, but it's
the extra nudge and I think it helped engage people.
Yeah, definitely a good long-term investment kind of payback for going to an
electric vehicle.
I guess that's funny you say all that because speaking of another guest we had
previously and being the director of partnerships, I'm sure you're familiar
with kind of what Chargeway is doing in the dealership space around education for
electric vehicles, because that does seem like that might be kind of a natural fit.
Obviously, they also have to be there.
Yep.
Yeah, broadly familiar.
Yeah, there's definitely a few players in this space that I think already touch
dealers more closely than we do and certainly interested in exploring
partnerships on that side.
I met, I did meet someone from NADA, the National Auto Dealers Association back in
September or so, an event.
And his sort of attitude and emotion was like,
my God, if you could bring me any and all solutions that help educate the dealers,
help them educate their customers, and also reduce the strain that's happening
between the OEM and the dealer, they're like, we're all ears right now.
There's so much want and need and frustration where everyone's kind of
pointing the finger at one another saying like, you need to do more, but there isn't
really.
sort of good lines of communication or engagement.
So yeah, it seems like there's an untapped need there for sure.
Yeah, that's interesting because I think that's been kind of the unifying theme
we've seen just on this podcast in general is education and in very different formats
is really the biggest missing piece or the area that needs the most work.
And I think especially on kind of the customer facing side, but especially in
the dealership space around kind of how these things tie together, why it's
important.
and what kind of makes the change.
And it's interesting since we're talking about the dealership space and we've been
talking primarily about fully electric vehicles so far on this episode.
I'm just kind of curious if your team has been doing anything around plug-in hybrids
because that seems to be kind of a renewed interest, especially among dealers where
kind of a lower barrier of education might be needed to kind of get someone in or
someone that already has a hybrid they kind of understand the step to.
Is that something your team has been seeing a lot of?
interest and kind of a need from the utilities of how to manage those sorts of
vehicles as well.
Yeah, totally.
So our utility programs right now are generally agnostic to P-Hev versus full
BEVs.
You can sign up either way.
And the automotive partners we're working with as well, yeah, range from kind of
like the fully electric to the ones that are more focused on P-Hevs in the interim.
So yeah, it's all part of the solution.
And I'm generally of the personal opinion that it is a good sort of transition.
option.
I think the real sort of trick and or danger is that it is so easy when you have
a PHEV to not charge.
And it's like, so on the one hand, it's kind of like a double-edged sword.
You don't want people to come to this belief.
Like if I forget to charge, I'm out of luck the next morning.
On the other hand...
If they're only ever going to remember to charge on like, you know, a particular day
that they're feeling good about saving the environment or something, and otherwise
they're like, most of my driving is on gasoline miles anyway, like it doesn't
matter, then you sort of miss the point.
But it is all in all, it's this awesome opportunity where it's like, yeah, like
folks, you don't drive more than 30 miles a day.
That's true for...
I can pick a random pool of people and that's true for like 90% of people.
They're going to say, no, I need to go on a road trip between San Francisco and Los
Angeles every day and with like 350 miles of range.
It's like, just plug in, plug off and get your 30 to 50 miles of PHEV range charged
again the next day and you'll barely ever drive gasoline miles again.
And then once you get used to it, why not?
make the jump.
And by the time you do make the jump, I assume ranges will have increased as well.
So should be a nice transition option if again, if we educate well along the way.
For sure.
With that, I am that's kind of an interesting thing you bring out with what
your technology does.
Given that it also looks at obviously the charging side of it and then the battery
size.
And what are you seeing as far as
Is there kind of a sweet spot or, and maybe this is more of a question on the
commercial side with what you do around the charging needs, having kind of a, like
once you start getting into like, especially the DC, I don't know how much
weave grades really now doing with DC fast charging versus AC and level two charging,
but it just seems like at one point, I'm just kind of curious, where is the best
return?
Is it like,
batteries need to be so big and then they can do level two charging.
Is that, I mean, is that a question you're getting from automakers about like use
case and where some of that, the data you're seeing, or is that still, uh, kind
of almost dependent on the user and what their kind of budget is when buying an EV
even.
Yeah, I'll say, yeah, no, it's a great line of thinking.
And I wouldn't say I have, where Weaver even necessarily has like a specific view
like today, especially with the first couple waves of adopters, right?
It's like most people adopting today have access to a charger at home.
That's obviously one of the big challenges as soon as we're going to.
go into a new adoption pool of people that don't necessarily have a dedicated
charger.
So up until now, it's been this like, 80% of charging is happening at home.
Let's focus on that wave of consumers.
Now, as we get into this much broader world of, of course, people have like
multifamily homes, apartment buildings, other types of dwellings that may not have
access to a garage or a charger, utilities are very interested.
in solving this because it's an equity question for them, right?
Electric utilities have this mandate to serve every customer and they can't kind
of, sure, for pilots they can do innovative new things with just single
family homes and EV drivers, but at the end of the day they need to make it
accessible to all drivers.
And so this is becoming a very big, your question is becoming a very big question
in the space of how do we make sure this serves everyone and that everyone can sort
of.
help benefit the grid, but also benefit from the grid in relatively equitable
ways.
And I do think for the automakers, some of the innovative work we're starting to do
with them is really building the OEM app, the mobile experience, as a bit of like a
concierge service that gives you the driver, the sort of insights and
recommendations you need and want.
about your charging.
I think right now there's this pain a lot of EV drivers feel of having 10 apps, all
the different charging networks, and maybe it's something from their OEM, it's
something from the utility, it's something from a third party.
I think we pretty strongly believe that OEMs have a right to win there with their
own mobile app, and of course some of those others, the charging networks can be
integrated in there.
And the role that we've heard plays, because we have a lot of data...
and insights on how what the car looks like and how the driver is using it for
charging, we can start to recommend, hey, like you're charging at home, you can
shift to better rates later at night, or hey, you're charging at home, but actually
the public network that you have access to is cheaper in the hour during which you
tend to come home from work.
Maybe you should charge there on your way home, and that's how you'll save money.
But you know, again, that's going to be with trade-offs of...
money versus time versus resources, et cetera.
That's just some of the sort of experimental thinking and discussions
where we're starting to have.
That's great.
And that does seem to be, uh, it's funny you mentioned that because that has always
been my biggest challenge with charging is just, and I feel like I'm a pretty tech
savvy person is around.
Just, you have to have an app for this system and there just seems to be a lack
of foresight around usually where these charges are, there is no cellular
connection or it is very weak.
And so both the timing out and just having to have an app for everything.
I think.
Uh,
I completely agree with you.
Like if you're gonna buy, let's say, a forward lightning, it makes sense for you
to have the forward lightning app.
And if you can put then the data from multiple charging groups into that one app
and kind of augment that where you can, awesome.
It is less likely and definitely a worse experience to have to have the forward
lightning app and then like 10 to 15 other definitely easy charging apps to just get
the system to work to begin with.
So that.
That makes a lot of sense.
And I think it's a big part, once again, of just the challenges around education
and what people are seeing in that space of kind of running into a lot of friction
for not even early adopters, but now as the auto market's growing and you're
starting to see more people get into the space, those challenges for kind of more
mainstream buyers.
Yeah.
And I'll just add that that's another one of the reasons we strive so hard to work
hand in hand with our automotive partners and our charging partners is that we don't
want to be one of that third app or that 17th app.
In fact, we don't have an app at all.
We work directly, they're co branding experiences with the utilities or co
branding or living sort of under the
by working hand in hand with the automaker or the charging companies is how we make
sure there's consistency between what the driver sees in their OEMF versus what they
say see in the head unit of the vehicle and the sort of HMI in the car versus
maybe their utility website and portal with respect to sort of their electric
vehicle.
I think right now there's.
so many touch points you could have.
And when they show you different information or conflicting controls, like
you say, set your charge schedule in one app, but it doesn't port over to, you
know, your OEM app or the interface you have in your vehicle, that's immensely
frustrating.
And so I think that's one thing we're just avoiding from day one by working directly
with the automakers on these integrations and making sure there's a consistent and
delightful experience for the driver.
For sure, and I realize we are kind of coming up on the time limit you have today
with us.
But before you go, I just wanted to kind of, I think, highlight a couple upcoming
events that your team has.
But first, where and how are, if people are listening to this, the best ways to
learn more about WeaveGrid and connect with you.
Sure.
Well, in good news, our lovely new website just launched this morning, starting to
get a little stale after a couple of years since the last refresh.
And so yeah, it's definitely a good place to start.
I think it's the news section, which has a lot of the reports and case studies to see
what we're up to.
And then yeah, there's some...
great events coming up.
It's wonderful because in our space, we're working with distribution utilities, we're
working with automotive.
Guess what?
There's an event called Distribute Tech that is next week in Orlando where a bunch
of our team will be with our utility clients and friends.
And there's an event called Auto Tech that we like going to in early June where a lot
of this discussion of transitioning or augmenting the software-defined vehicles
into sort of grid interactive vehicles happens.
We'll look to play a more leading role this year.
But yeah, our website, our newsletter, if you want access to that, always happy to
spread the gospel of WeaveGrid through our various channels.
Well, I appreciate that.
I know when we were, uh, kind of playing and discussing this episode, it sounds
like you guys will also be at South by Southwest this year.
Um, so it definitely seems like you guys are trying to be out there and get the
word out about weave grading, kind of share what, how, not only how you guys are
helping, but like how serious the need is for kind of filling these gaps when it
comes to electric vehicle charging and especially the data and technology side.
Bridging all these together.
Yeah, absolutely.
We're super pumped.
I think South by Southwest is March 10th, if I remember correctly, our panel there.
So, yeah, really bringing some of the work we do is very behind the scenes.
It's kind of the digital infrastructure for the physical infrastructure, which
most people don't see or care about, which is totally fine.
But yeah, these opportunities like South by Southwest really present a nice
opportunity to bring that a little bit into the.
you know, the public sphere and the public dialogue so people get a sense of, oh,
there's some cool stuff going on behind the scenes to make this revolution a
reality.
For sure.
And I think with that, we'll kind of end today's episode, but I just want to say
thank you so much for coming on today, Yakov.
And it's been really interesting learning more about WeaveGrid and it's great to see
that this technology is out there just because it does.
It's great that you guys are kind of the layer between so many of these different
technologies that everyone wants to like promote each and each of these
technologies do have their strengths in place.
But there's definitely a huge opportunity for really making a lot easier for all of
these to communicate together and to provide that data to make them more
efficient for the end user.
So thank you so much for coming on today.
Of course, thank you for having me.
Thank you for joining us today.
As we wrap up this enlightening conversation with Yakov Berenshteyn the
Director of Partnerships at GridWeave, we hope you're walking away with a renewed
sense of optimism and curiosity about clean transportation and the future of
energy, all of which can build a stronger and more resilient electrical grid.
Yakov's insights into the evolving landscape of renewable energy and how
electric vehicles can better help with this transition.
made possible by the innovative efforts at GridWeave remind us of the impactful
changes happening in our world, driven by technology, partnership, and collective
action.
We want to extend our sincerest thanks to Yakov for joining us today and sharing his
expertise and vision.
It's conversations like these that fuel our passion for exploring the connections
that shape our grid and our future.
Before we sign off, we'd love to keep this conversation going and hearing your
thoughts.
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Until next week, this is the Grid Connections Podcast, signing