GridIQ

Aren Page: I come from electrical engineering at PG&E, where I worked on distribution-level grids and substation design, with a focus primarily on wildfire hardening and understanding the relationship between utility impact and wildfire causation. What became clear is that having a more thorough view of the health of our distribution grid — geolocating faults and understanding what type of faults exist where — is something the utility space is still continuously trying to solve.

 

So what GridIQ really does is take that problem and provide better information and better data to utilities: highly accurate geolocation capabilities and categorization from the desktop. That means when something does go wrong, utilities can understand what kind of issue we're going to face before crews actually get out into the field.

 

This is really important for wildfires, because we're working across various severity levels and different landscapes that utilities run through. If we can understand what type of fault is happening where, decisions can be made before getting out to the field. Knowing what we're going to interact with reduces potential maintenance time and helps prevent catastrophic events such as ignition. GridIQ is really working around the current infrastructure we have and figuring out how to augment it in a way that's economically beneficial for our communities, building a smarter system overall.

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Morgan Campbell: About half of the most damaging wildfires in California in the last number of years started with a utility ignition. But as we've been having more conversations with utilities and other partners, we've realized that the use cases for GridIQ extend significantly beyond wildfire. Modern grid intelligence can play a big role in preventing catastrophic events on the grid, and restoring service much faster after catastrophic storms. But even small faults that cause service disruptions can have huge big impacts on end customers like data centers, where minutes matter. Being able to identify where those faults are happening and why they're happening, and what those faults look like on the grid, is worth millions to those end customers guaranteeing service continuity. 

 

So the key problem we're solving is that there's just not a lot of visibility on the grid. When you look at the software industry for example, you can develop reports within seconds that tell you exactly what code failed, and as a result you can get 99.99% uptime. You just can't do that on the electric grid. Instead you've got these blind systems, like reclosers that trigger, and often you have to send a crew out to do a visual inspection in the field before you know exactly what happened and whether its safe to turn the power back on. 

Aren Page: In college I was studying engineering, and during the summers I was working as a wildland firefighter. Then in 2017 — I'm from the Petaluma/Santa Rosa area in Northern California — we experienced a major wildfire that burned through a majority of the urban area. It was pretty impactful to see how communities were affected by this kind of problem, and it became clear to me that the only direction I wanted to focus on in my career was solving this problem.

 

So I went directly into working with the utility to build a relationship that was collaborative — understanding that this is a problem that affects all of us. That was extremely beneficial. Being inside the utility helped me really understand what we're facing and how we work together to create a technology that can tackle this issue as a whole.

Aren Page: My family was evacuated during the Tubbs fire, and many of my close friends' families had homes burn down. I realized this is something we don't have much time to figure out a solution for before things continue to go wrong. That really points to the need for proactive involvement — we have to anticipate something that might go wrong in five years, versus reacting to what's happening right now. GridIQ is really focused on that as an ethos. 

 

Morgan Campbell: Building hardware requires longer development timelines. Even once we had a prototype, actually finding places where we could test in a simulated but real-world environment, where we're looking for systems operating above 6 or even 12 kV, with conductorline that could be half a mile to a mile long, is really hard. Partnerships are so integral, even at this early stage, for us to be successful and to hit our product development milestones.

Aren Page: I think one of the solutions the industry has come up with is taking all of the infrastructure we currently have and rebuilding it — rebuilding it underground, or rebuilding it in a different way. That takes a long time and is very expensive. If we're going to move quickly and prevent these catastrophic events, we need to work with what we currently have, and that's the aging infrastructure of overhead line.

 

It doesn't mean we do one or the other — it means we do both. We're going to be continuously rebuilding the grid, we're going to be undergrounding, but we also need to figure out how we utilize what we currently have and make that applicable so that we're in a safe place.

Aren Page: Anticipate the problem before it happens. Get into the solution faster. If we started this company ten years ago, before the Tubbs fire — maybe we could have had an impact sooner. Continue to ask what can go wrong in the future, and how to solve that problem before it occurs.

 

Morgan Campbell: Constantly be surrounding yourself with people and opportunities that advance your learning. Don't worry so much about the role that you're in, but try to take roles that get you closer and closer to the problems that you want to solve. Having moved into the climate space three years ago, it's been incredible, and I wish I would have jumped into climate and worked on issues that I care about right from day one.

Aren Page: If someone ten years from now could look back and say this problem was solved, or that their life is better or easier because this person existed — I think that's success for me. If you're doing something in your career that gives you a reason to wake up every day, and there's an ethos involved, and you can't imagine doing anything else but trying to solve this problem because it means so much to you, and it means a lot to people who will encounter this problem years down the line, that feels like success. 

 

Morgan Campbell: For GridIQ, I'd say short-term success is starting to work with utility partners and getting our application out in the field. But the longer-term vision is that utilities feel so confident in the data and the readings that we're able to identify, that they're able to automate systems and completely change some processes — because they have a system they can rely on, that doesn't have any false positives, that can give them clarity on what type of fault they're seeing. They feel so confident in the data that, if a recloser is tripped and GridIQ is able to prove that fault is no longer on the line, they're able to flip the switch and turn the power back on in minutes, without having to send a ground crew out. That's success for us: that they have that level of confidence in the system we're building.