Voltus President and Co-founder, Matt Plante, joins Julia Bunte-Mein from The Seeds to discuss the electric grid of the future, the DER technology and policy to get us there, lessons learned from the Texas and California blackouts, and what makes Voltus special.
Read more about The Seeds and its creator, Julia Bunte-Mein, here. Learn more about becoming a Voltan here. More questions? Email info@voltus.co.
Author: Matt Plante, President & Co-founder
On Monday, March 9th, 2020, during Veritas (our weekly all-hands call), we hired our 67th employee (Lauren Stenstream, Indomitable Controller), we named Luke “Snakeman” Talltree the Voltan of the Week (Luke installed our technology at seven new customer sites that week), and we celebrated International Women’s Day. Oh yes, and we announced that we were moving our first ever customer conference, scheduled to be held in Times Square on April 1st, to a virtual meeting. On March 9th, 2020, the world had changed.
We’ve now been living in that changed world for over a full year. 8760+ hours. It’s a year – for obvious reasons, for many reasons, for countless virtual conference reasons – that we don’t ever want to repeat.
Yet today, we hired our 104th employee (Jesus Martinez, Production Technician), we were publicly lauded by one of the world’s largest companies for helping them manage February’s Texas energy crisis, and we closed a deal with an important partner. Oh yes, and we hired Jon Wellinghoff, the former FERC Chairman (since you’re reading an energy blog, I suppose that last clause was unnecessary).
2020 threw haymaker after haymaker…and we came out stronger. The following seven reasons help explain why, and we hope they will help others lead through times of adversity as well.
We did something else today: we booked an actual, physical, in-person location for VoltusFest, our semi-annual company-wide off-site. We’ll be in Austin, where we’ll share, support, make mistakes, innovate, get after it, celebrate, and, yes, love. We can’t wait. We cannot wait.
We’re hiring. View all open positions at www.voltus.co/join-us
Voltus, Inc., the world’s leading Distributed Energy Resources (DER) technology platform, announces a historic win in its battle to ensure the equal treatment of all DERs in wholesale power markets. Yesterday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) responded to Voltus’s October filing by taking steps to unify the treatment of all DERs under Order 2222, ensuring that demand response (DR) can fully participate in wholesale markets as part of DER aggregations without discriminatory state and local barriers.
“FERC’s clarification provides an immediate opportunity for demand response to deliver reliability, economic, and sustainability benefits to every state that is part of a wholesale power market,” said Voltus Chief Regulatory Officer and former FERC Chairman, Jon Wellinghoff. “DER aggregators like Voltus will be able to help customers and DER partners access states that previously restricted demand response from coming to market.”
In his opening statements at today’s meeting, FERC Commissioner Neil Chatterjee lauded the Commission’s decision to prevent the state opt-out provision in Order 719 from “serving as a barrier to demand response resources participating in mixed aggregations.” Chatterjee also stated, “Our responsibility is to make sure our federal wholesale markets deliver reliable low-cost energy services to consumers and the way to get there is to make sure emerging technologies can enter the market, period.”
Voltus celebrates the significance of this step for energy consumers nationwide. “We’re very grateful that FERC removed this barrier to full DR market participation so quickly,” says Gregg Dixon, Voltus Co-founder and CEO. “The benefits of this decision will result in significantly lower wholesale electricity prices, a more reliable grid, and a better environment for all.”
About Voltus, Inc.
Voltus aims to be the Distributed Energy Platform that fulfills the promise of the energy transition. Voltus represents the “potential of us” to better manage energy through simple, cost and risk-free programs for Distributed Energy Resources. To learn more, visit www.voltus.co.
Voltus Media Relations
Kelly Yazdani
Director of Marketing
703-340-9353
kyazdani@voltus.co
3 March 2021, San Francisco, CA
Voltus, Inc., the leading platform for Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), announced today the release of CashDash 2.0, the financial transaction engine of its DER operating system, VoltApp. With the release of CashDash 2.0, VoltApp becomes the only auditable DER platform in the world, allowing Voltus and its partners to monetize every type of behind-the-meter DER with an automated “meter to market to money” customer experience. According to Voltus CEO Gregg Dixon, “VoltApp is the transaction platform that unlocks the full value of DERs, from smart thermostats and electric vehicles to battery storage and distributed generation. VoltApp provides a direct connection between these DERs and every wholesale electricity market in North America.”
CashDash 2.0 gives customers the ability to forecast, audit, and report on the value of their DERs across all energy markets. Supported by 30-second telemetry data, VoltApp automatically connects to and settles financial performance with the market, while providing full digital payment processing and line item automation. All of Voltus’s customers and partners gain immediate access to CashDash 2.0.
“This solves many of the problems that have held back our investment in DERs,“ said Jim Mullin, Director of Energy Procurement at JBS. “Our team now sees, in real-time, the value of managing JBS’s energy every hour of the year. This allows us to budget and forecast the value of JBS’s operational flexibility. It’s what we’ve been asking for for years.”
The power of VoltApp extends beyond Voltus’s direct customers. This transaction platform is used by third parties who want to access the very same markets that Voltus serves. “Rather than building out their own resources market by market, DER type by DER type, we’ve built for our partners a set of common services for any DER to interact with all markets,” says Neil Lakin, Voltus’s Chief Technology Officer.
The need to easily monetize and unleash DER capability has never been more apparent. February’s ice storms across Texas triggered rolling blackouts throughout ERCOT, MISO, and SPP, as generation capacity failed to keep up with demand. Also, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s landmark Order 2222 calls for the unified treatment of DERs in all wholesale markets nationwide, opening up new markets and states to DERs. “The market for our product is exponentially larger than even we believed when we started Voltus. We’re now serving classes of customers and we’re in markets that we never contemplated in our original business plan,” explains Lakin.
As DERs, powered by VoltApp, take a more and more prominent role in power markets, the grid moves closer toward the clean energy transition. Says Dixon, “When DERs are given unbridled access to wholesale markets, we will see a massive shift from central power stations to energy on the edge and an energy internet of things that becomes the new paradigm of power. The benefits of this paradigm are undeniable. Just like our current paradigm of computing is superior to the mainframes and “dumb terminals” of the 1970s, DERs are simply a superior model for a reliable and resilient electric grid.”
About Voltus, Inc.
Voltus aims to be the distributed energy platform that fulfills the promise of the energy transition. Voltus represents the “potential of us” to better manage energy through simple, cost and risk-free programs for distributed energy resources. Our commercial and industrial customers generate cash by allowing us to maximize the value of their operational flexibility in energy markets. What’s more, there are significant community benefits that accompany working with Voltus – a cleaner, more reliable energy future and dollars invested back into your business. To learn more, visit www.voltus.co.
Voltus Media Relations
Kelly Yazdani
Director of Marketing
703-340-9353
kyazdani@voltus.co
This post is in honor of International Women’s Day, as the women of the world find their passions, strike the balance, and write their own stories. This is my story.
Last month I joined Voltus as the Director of Marketing. Just like the virtual power plants Voltus manages, the Voltus team is entirely virtual, meaning we #workfromanywhere. The result is a surprisingly close-knit group of Voltans and a company culture ruled by trust and flexibility. As a result, I’m living my dream, working hard at a job I love in a fast-paced environment with the smartest people I’ve ever met, while balancing equally demanding personal roles of wife and mother. Last week, I popped over to my daughter’s school and read a book to her class before jumping back on a work call to plan a conference in NYC. I work until dinnertime and then walk upstairs to eat with my family. I can easily sign online seconds after putting my kids to bed to finish a task.
Although this position is my current state, my professional journey has been atypical to say the least. After graduating top of my class with a degree in Chemistry from Dartmouth at 21, I rolled out of college with a six figure, 80+ hour per week job in the male dominated energy trading industry. I had the proverbial world at my feet, one of three women in an otherwise all male company. I worked hard. I did not play hard. I worked harder. Then the unthinkable happened. At 24, I got pregnant with my first child.
The backlash was intense to say the least. Like out of a Mad Men clip, I had a male colleague say to 6 month pregnant me:
Shouldn’t you be home, barefoot and pregnant, where you belong?
I’d like to say that the comments stopped with one chauvinistic co-worker, but the comments were not limited to the often cold corporate world, nor were they limited to men. Well meaning female family members and friends lamented my lost potential and how my life would never be the same.
Successful women I knew looked at me with pity, like I had violated an oath I made to my generation, to educated women everywhere. It quickly became clear that balance would not be achieved at my 80 hour per week job. I opted to take some time off and reevaluate. A month later my son was born and the next unthinkable thing happened: I didn’t want to go back to work.
The sweetness of motherhood didn’t stop the aching insecurity that I was doing things backwards, misallocating the prime of my life. Despite these feelings, I dove into momming full force. Four and a half years and three kids later, my home and heart were full, but my brain was ready for a change.
There is no way you are going to find a good job after taking time off.
Wary of needing to explain the gap in my resume, I started a business with a friend and jumped into the world of entrepreneurship, e-commerce, and marketing and eventually landed at a more established start-up doing similar work. Something was still missing though. I was the only person at my company with kids and, to be frank, I yearned to work with other parents. Sometimes school gets canceled. Sometimes children get sick. I always felt awkward needing to explain those things to a group of thirty somethings that, despite good intentions, couldn’t always relate.
In October 2019, a solution fell out of the sky in the form of a LinkedIn message from Dana Guernsey, VP of Product and Energy Markets at Voltus. Dana and I had been introduced by a mutual friend several years back. We shared an interest in energy and a college alma mater. Dana’s message was clear: Voltus was hiring. As I learned more about the company, such as their commitment to bringing more women into Cleantech (women currently constitute 40% of Voltus’s workforce and rising), applying and ultimately accepting the position was a no brainer. Voltus is an incredible group of bright, gritty, and good women and men and includes the strongest group of kick butt working moms and single parents that I’ve ever met. The values that brought Voltus to life have created a system where people, regardless of personal circumstance, can thrive. My only hope is that other organizations can emulate Voltus’s model, allowing people to make a positive impact on our planet while continuing to prioritize the things they hold dear. I’m proud to be part of the #womenofvoltus. Who else wants to join us?
Interested in learning more about current opportunities at Voltus? Click here.
Recently I was in a meeting with four other women and it was embarrassingly notable. I’ve long ago stopped noticing when I am in a meeting with four men, so why should four women catch my attention? The answer of course is that this was a rare occurrence. Ask any woman in cleantech and she’ll tell you she’s more often than not the only female in the room. I will admit that in the past I used do things like wear my glasses, put my hair back, wear a button-up shirt – essentially I was trying to blend in, so I wouldn’t be perceived or judged in any way beyond my professional contributions. These were physical adjustments, rather than what I believe are more appropriate behavioral ones. Women should speak up more, say sorry less, demand what they want, and stop caveating. We need to fight the gender gap in cleantech, and encourage more women to enter, stay in, and become leaders in this amazing field.
Ironically, the clean energy industry is one of the best opportunities to have a positive influence in the world. It impacts everyone, and getting it right makes our planet better. It is exciting, fun, and has a positive social impact . . . something that women rank very highly when considering their careers. Sadly, many still believe inherent biological reasons exist that make men better suited for STEM careers than women. Absurd . . . yes, but the argument boils down to this: if 30 applicants apply for a position and only 4 of them are female, odds are that the best candidate for the job is male . . . and doesn’t every company just want to hire the best? What this is missing, however, is that the industry has a pipeline problem. The problem isn’t that a company might select one of the 26 males as the best candidate for the position – the problem is that the company didn’t do more up front on the issue that only 13% of their candidates in the pipeline were women to begin with.
At Voltus, we know we need to proactively recruit female candidates . . . the male candidates come to us easily. This is because, not surprisingly, our professional networks represent the existing industry bias – sitting at just 23% female, so we need to actively manage against this in order to avoid perpetuating the problem. We have done dramatically more direct outreach to female candidates, recruited directly through university networks (which have closer to even ratios), and posted and networked within female-based industry groups. We’ve done a decent job of improving the number of female candidates we attract, but we need to do much, much better.
We seek creative new ways to build out our pipeline of female candidates . . . this post itself is written to raise this issue and attract female candidates. Please share your stories, feedback, and advice with us, send this around to your female friends and colleagues, and come talk to us!
Dana Guernsey – Vice President of Market and Business Operations, Voltus, Inc.
