My 6 takeaways from RE+
Just wrapped up three days at RE+ and it was an exhausting blast. The show was not simply packed and buzzing. It was literally overflowing, a sign of both the eagerness to get back to in-person business, and the rapid growth of renewable energy.
Here are some of the things that stood out to me at RE+.
Resiliency is top of mind. When I first entered the energy sector in 2016, the focus was squarely on the economics, e.g. how do I maximize the value stack on top of an asset. Only utilities/DSOs, RTOs/ISOs and some regulators talked about energy resilience back then. With the various and numerous shocks to the energy system in the past few years, whether triggered by pandemic or war or extreme weather events– resiliency and reliability top of mind for everyone, down to the end customers.
Societal impact was a major theme, from the keynotes down to the wonky technical breakout sessions. The word “equity” was used about 100X more frequently than when I last went to a big solar tradeshow in 2018. I purposely used “societal impact” rather than “equity” as the headline here because the latter word has become so politically fraught in the U.S. Some of the discussions of energy equity did strike me as merely adhering to progressive orthodoxy. However, that was balanced by numerous concrete, meaningful discussions of the impact of specific energy investments and policies on real people and real communities of all types– urban, rural, low-income, disabled and more. That was heartening.
Top down planning is urgently needed in the U.S. energy system not only to transition to renewable energy and support electrification, but also to ensure resiliency. The system is too complicated to incrementally make changes from the bottom up and land at a reasonable and reasonably speedy outcome. This will require a tremendous cross-industry and government collaboration that is hard to envision in our polarized environment.
China continues to be the proverbial 800 lb panda in terms of producing the hard tech for renewable energy. The significant majority of solar panel and battery manufacturers at the expo were Chinese (now that they’re able to travel again post-lockdown), although there were numerous countries represented. It will be interesting to see how the Made in America programs from the Biden administration affect this over time, but in terms of who has equipment to sell right now, it’s the Chinese.
AI? Not quite yet. A decent number (but still the minority) of climatetech software vendors at RE+ were touting AI capabilities, but the ones I saw were mostly AI in search of a real use case (and decent training data). But that’s true of a lot of AI startups regardless of vertical.
IRL FTW. I had almost forgotten how much you can get done by talking to people at a conference vs. trying to reach out to the same people over LinkedIn and email. Whether it was a four hour hands-on grid interconnection workshop or 5 minute chats on the show floor, face to face engagement >> Zoom. Bonus, in an industry like energy, it’s cool to see the equipment on the show floor (you don’t see that at Dreamforce, where a lot of my enterprise software peeps have been this week.)
Now, back to the Zoom and email grind…