Home-DR start-up Greenlet Technologies recently completed a
20-home pilot for Israeli Electric Corp "with very good results,
from both the utility and consumer point of view," Itai Karelic,
director of business development, told us yesterday. The
trial, set in and around Tel Aviv, is now being expanded to 150
homes, he said.
Greenlet, which specializes in letting utilities control
residential consumers' plug loads through simple hardware installed
by the homeowner, debuted its wares at the Autovation conference
last September in Denver (SGT,
Oct-01). Since then it has grown to 10 employees
from six and nearly doubled its capitalization, to $1 million from
$600,000, Karelic said.
The Israeli pilot showed that consumers "liked being able to
understand how much power their major appliances connected to our
system cost them," he said. Cycling wall air
conditioners did not distress consumers, even with cuts of up to
50%, so long as the comfort level did not decline unreasonably, he
said.
Not all the 20 homes were behind the same substation, so the
pilot did not demonstrate much about how Greenlet's technology
affects utility load, Karelic acknowledged. But the
larger pilot will do so, he said.
In the US, trials of Greenlet's technology are under way for
three months at "one of the three big West Coast IOUs," Karelic
said, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Three East Coast
utilities are conducting lab tests or installing it in some
employees' homes, he said.
Greenlet's product is meant to be bought by utilities for use by
consumers. It consists of modules that sit between an
appliance and a wall plug, as well as an energy-management system
run by Greenlet on behalf of the utility. Compared with
the initial version of the project, the recently released beta
version adds more power-quality data, something utilities have been
requesting, Karelic said.
The main competition continues to be Tendril, which offers
whole-home as well as plug-based DR. But Greenlet
offers "far more power-quality data, and more DR verification,"
than Tendril, he said. Another emerging competitor is start-up
Sequentric Energy Systems, of Wilmington, NC, he said