Vishal Kapadia spent over three years at Walmart, where he led the retail giant’s energy strategy and invested in over two gigawatts of clean energy capacity. But starting today, he has a new job, and one that’s a bit of a pivot: as the next CEO of the dynamic line rating startup LineVision.
LineVision takes a hybrid approach to DLR that uses both software and sensors to maximize capacity on specific lines, by up to 40%. DLR as a category of technology includes both digital and physical solutions, and is widely recognized as a way to make the most of the existing grid.
However, actual deployment by cautious and slow-moving utilities has been scattered. Founded in 2018, LineVision has grown into one of the dominant players in the nascent space — though the process of operationalizing the technology with utilities took years.
The previous CEO and co-founder Hudson Gilmer will now be chairman of the board. Gilmer, in an interview with Latitude Media last year about an AES pilot project with LineVision, said that utilities take DLR seriously once their peers do. Today, after years of pilot projects and conversations about the technology’s promise, LineVision is deployed with utilities including AES, Dominion, Exelon, National Grid, and Southern Company.
Now that LineVision has the trust of these major players, Kapadia argues that utility customers will help supercharge the company’s growth.
“We are deployed in utility operations today… the solution is proven, the value proposition is clear,” he told Latitude Media in an exclusive interview about the transition. “And it’s just a matter of needing to create pathways to ultimately accelerate deployment.”
Kapadia’s goal is to create customer “pull” for DLR and its benefits, rather than having to push the technology on the utilities that could benefit.
“I’ve got a pretty unique perspective and set of relationships to be able to pull together a broader consortium of awareness of the benefits of the product,” Kapadia said. “That can then be leveraged with the deep relationships that the company has already established to start to create a lot more pull for the product.”
Kapadia’s previous work includes helping lead Ørsted’s onshore wind work, leading renewable energy project finance at Morgan Stanley, and serving on the board of the American Council on Renewable Energy.
Kapadia said his focus is to encourage more demand for DLR from both utilities, and their large energy customers — from data centers to major retailers like Walmart. In an era of load growth, those customers are competing for limited power, so it’s in their interest for the grid to have as much capacity on offer as possible. Even if they won’t be the ones actually installing sensors on lines, major ratepayers are a powerful force in compelling a utility to explore a new technology.
Meeting the challenges at hand
Kapadia said both businesses and utilities are facing four key energy challenges (what he dubs an “ACRE” of considerations): access, cost, resilience, and emissions. And his pitch to these potential customers — and customers of customers — is that LineVision helps meet each of them.
DLR unlocks more transmission capacity without having to build new infrastructure, which keeps costs down. It also should bring down the number of non-weather-related outages (Kapadia said Walmart saw almost 20% more non-weather outages across its system in the last three or four years) — and simultaneously bring down emissions by increasing the grid’s penetration of renewable capacity.
Kapadia knows these concerns first-hand. He said he had been aware of LineVision for years, and “watching its progress from afar”; his own work at Walmart made him particularly interested in technologies that could make the most of the existing grid, like grid-enhancing technologies such as DLR. So when he heard the company was searching for a new leader, he pursued the opportunity.
He’s taking on a big job. This transition comes at a complicated time for grid technologies like DLR. When President Donald Trump took office, he made powering the growth of the data centers that power artificial intelligence a key goal of his administration. But his administration is stalling even those Biden administration efforts that would benefit the grid — and those AI facilities. For instance, last month the Trump administration said it will audit the roughly $10 billion in Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships grants, which were allocated via the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That has held up projects that could protect the grid from extreme weather, lower costs, and expand the grid’s capacity via GETs like DLR.
But Kapadia’s bet is that the demands of a market transformed by load growth will outweigh that uncertainty. Essentially, he said, DLR is energy source-agnostic — and therefore should be able to withstand shifts in political whims.
“The value proposition, in my mind, is needed now more than ever, and it’s very clear that it is designed to support the infrastructure that powers the entirety of our economy and will only increasingly do so going forward,” he said. “It can and should be insulated from some of the fits and starts that we’ve had over the last number of months across the clean energy sector more broadly.”
