In 2018, LineVision was a young company with revolutionary technology for electric transmission lines. Its dynamic line rating sensors and software could increase the capacity of existing power lines by up to 40% without building new infrastructure — a critical solution for integrating renewables and meeting growing electricity demand.
But to prove its tech, it needed to win over notoriously cautious utilities. When a crucial project worth $750,000 went to a competitor, LineVision’s leadership made a last-ditch appeal that changed the company’s trajectory.
In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with LineVision’s vice president of customer success, Karthik Rao, about navigating utility cybersecurity requirements, escaping “pilot hell,” and how LineVision became the partner behind the world’s largest DLR project.
Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.
The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media Podcast at the Frontier of Climate Technology.
Karthik Rao: And so there was a large mid lens utility that was trying to find their next partner for dynamic line ratings and issuing an RFP to try to find who their partner would be. And this was sort of a must win project for us. We knew that there was about 750 K tied to this deal, which for a company that’s operating off of 2 million, you can kind of appreciate just the scale. That’s a pretty meaningful amount of additional runway that we can get by winning this deal. And we were sort of devastated when we heard back from the utility that they had in fact chosen a different provider for this project. And so that was where we recognized that we couldn’t just let that go and we needed to give it our one last best shot
Lara Pierpoint: Back in 2018. It was make or break time for LineVision. A year earlier, LineVision had launched with a revolutionary technology for electric transmission lines, a combination of sensors and software that could dramatically increase the capacity of existing power lines. It’s the technology that enables Dynamic Line Ratings or DLR. The tech helps Power grid operators get the most out of existing infrastructure, which is critical for the clean energy transition, but to move forward LineVision needed to convince utilities to adopt its technology. And Karthik Rao current VP of customer success tells this story about a critical phone call.
Karthik Rao: So our CEO Hudson called up one of the key buyers from that utility and essentially made the case in as plain English as we could around why we know that we are the best partner for their particular situation, why our technology is the one they should trust. And essentially making that case in that argument to that utility in the best way that we knew how
Lara Pierpoint: That’s really all LineVision could do plead for a shot to test its tech. So after Hudson hung up the phone, they waited,
Karthik Rao: It was a few days later that the company was kind of in it having its all hands meeting. We’re kind of figuring out what are we going to do next? And our co-founder got a call from the key contact at that utility. And during that meeting we saw him kind of dancing on his screen where everyone wanting to figure out what was going on. And it turned out that they had made the decision to pilot us as well.
Lara Pierpoint: Winning that RFP or request for proposals was huge for LineVision. It was getting the opportunity to test its technology with a major utility and it had secured a new partnership, one that would grow into something much bigger
Karthik Rao: Four or five years later. That utility is a trusted partner of ours and they are currently deploying the largest DLR project in the world. They have gone all in on this technology. They’re using it to solve their pressing load growth challenges around AI and data centers. And it’s really just a great example of how in those early days, getting those customers, earning their trust and delivering those proof points is what allows companies like ours to really kind of take it to the next level and deliver meaningful value.
Lara Pierpoint: I am Lara Pierpoint and this is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We’ve already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don’t have decades to get them commercialized. We have years this week I talk with Karthik Rao, vice president of customer success at LineVision about how the company is helping increase transmission capacity without building new power lines and what it takes to integrate with utility operations.
Karthik Rao: We are solving the problem of increasing the capacity and resilience of the electric grid. So when we think about the energy transition really broadly, we need to do two things, right? We need to electrify everything and we need to green the grid by bringing in more renewable power. And unfortunately right now we don’t have nearly enough transmission to do that. And building new transmission is really hard.
Lara Pierpoint: We don’t need to go deep into the weeds of why building transmission is hard, but trust me when I say it is really, really hard. It’s expensive, it takes a long time, sometimes a decade or more, and it’s plagued by cost allocation and permitting issues. So LineVision like other DLR providers offers a faster alternative
Karthik Rao: LineVision has a technology, it’s a combination of software and sensors that allows us to increase the capacity of a transmission line by up to 40% or more without having to either conductor the line or build new lines.
Lara Pierpoint: Every transmission line or conductor has a rating, and that rating says how much current can safely run through the line without going over the maximum operating temperature because when lines get too hot, they can fail. Traditionally these ratings have been very conservative or lower than they could be.
Karthik Rao: So let’s say on the hottest day of the year when the wind isn’t blowing, when that line is already starting to overheat, what’s the maximum amount of current you can run through under those conditions before exceeding that MOT or maximum operating temperature and whatever that number is becomes the fixed rating all year round. This is a little bit like if we were to run our highway system and set the speed limit at 20 miles per hour on the off chance that somewhere in the country there’s a blinding snowstorm, which is causing people to slow down. I think we would all agree that that’s a really inefficient way to run our roads, but that’s effectively how we’re running the electric grid today.
Lara Pierpoint: LineVision’s approach is different. Instead of relying on that stagnant rating, it monitors align’s condition in real time and then determines the actual capacity,
Karthik Rao: It turns out that it’s the cooling effect of wind that actually has the biggest impact on the capacity of the line. And so understanding wind at a really accurate hyperlocal level allows us to understand what that true capacity is. And we can go from a static line rating to a dynamic line rating. In other words, we’re going to change the rating every hour based on real world conditions. And by doing that, that’s how we unlock that 40% or more of additional capacity that’s otherwise dormant.
Lara Pierpoint: The technology LineVision has used to determine real-time capacity has evolved since its founding. Originally. LineVision used electromagnetic field sensors to monitor transmission lines.
Karthik Rao: If you can picture one of the transmission line corridors that you might see on the highway where you see many lines or conductors kind of hanging in parallel with one another, you can imagine trying to use EMF sensors to isolate the signal from each of those individual conductors and all the complicated map that goes into it. And long story short, that got really messy really quickly and was not kind of an efficient way to get the information that we needed.
Lara Pierpoint: So LineVision decided to pivot to an optical sensor based technology. Lidar. The LIDAR sensor allowed them to actually look at the lines and see, for example, if they were sagging, sagging means the line is heating up. It also allowed them to see how much the line was moving from side to side, which gave them information about the wind speed in that area.
Karthik Rao: And so using that type of information was kind of the next generation of our product that allowed us to get more accurate readings of the behavior of the conductor and ultimately be able to provide the dynamic line rating.
Lara Pierpoint: LineVision piloted this technology for years with multiple utilities across the country. They were essentially in what many companies refer to as Pilot Hell. This is the place where new technologies sometimes go to die, but in 2022, LineVision caught a break when one of its utility partners finally said it wanted to try integrating LineVision’s technology into its operations. I talked with Karthik about that first big test, what he learned and how LineVision worked its way out of utility pilot. Hell, okay, so you’re ready to operationalize the technology and you’ve got a utility who’s interested in doing this. What was kind of the business case or the reason that the utility ultimately wanted to move from just using your technology from a visibility perspective into using it to actually make operational decisions?
Karthik Rao: So usually there is a pressing business problem that the utility executive cares about. And increasingly the one that we see most often is around load growth. When there’s potentially new commercial load growth happening in their service territory, the last thing they want to do is to say, we don’t have that capacity where essentially turning you away, that’s a very bad look for utility. And so they really are looking for what tools they have in their tool belt to bring more capacity to bear and be able to incorporate that load into their operations. So that really tends to be the kinds of things that they look for when making that decision of we’ve got these technologies that have been proven out in a pilot situation, but now that we’ve done that, we actually know that this could help us with the real problems that we care about. Let’s take that next step to operationalize and start incorporating it into the day-to-day operations of the grid.
Lara Pierpoint: Right, and that’s really cool and we’ll talk a little bit more about what it takes to move utilities in this space, but I think you’re really alluding to the fact that it comes down to a real business case where there’s something urgent. And particularly when you have that nexus with grid reliability, which is what’s happening when you’re talking about bringing these new huge loads on, that’s where you really get executives attention and you start wanting to, as you say, make these operational decisions. So let’s talk about how that came about. Who was your first partner who was willing to jump in on this with you, and what did the conversation first look like when you sat down to talk about what it was going to take to move into this mode where now you’re not just looking at what’s happening on these lines, but you’re making control room decisions with that information?
Karthik Rao: Yeah. The first company to officially move forward with operationalizing was DLC Duque Light Company in Pennsylvania. And they really were motivated to do this because they understood where the puck was headed in terms of building a grid that had end-to-end visibility. And they recognized the story around resilience, reliability, increased capacity, lowered cost to rate payers. They were one of the more visionary utilities that understood that without the use of data and sensors and technology we’re never going to be able to make that transition to a much smarter grid. And so they really took that first step of saying, you know what? We’re not just going to use this as kind of a readonly nice to have kind of information. We’re going to take that next step of integrating it into our operations so we can actually demonstrate that value for real. And candidly just be a leader in the space that other utilities can look to say, look, this is actually being done in the real world. Maybe we can try it too. And so DLC as one of those early customers really gets a lot of credit for being able to think in a forward looking way like that and really make something happen.
Lara Pierpoint: And so what happened when you first sat down with the DLC team to figure out how you were going to put this together and operationalize it for them
Karthik Rao: As a new technology company? One of the things that we wanted to do was help utilities make that transition into more of a cloud-based computing situation, right? So when you think about large enterprises over the past of decades, many of them have moved from more sort of traditional on-prem architectures to cloud-based architectures, even entities that highly value security. For example, the Department of Defense uses cloud-based computing now. And so we were in hindsight, a little bit naive about the fact that we could do a cloud integration and provide this data to them and they would find a way to put that into their EMS and use it in their day-to-day grid operations. I remember the meeting that we were in when we proposed that type of an approach and the win kind of coming out of the sails in the conversation because they recognized that the cybersecurity standards that they have around their control room was really not going to jive well with a cloud-based approach.
And so they’re required to meet standards known as nerc sip, which provide reliability standards around cybersecurity. And the control room is a highly secure environment that typically does not talk to the internet, does not like to bring in data from the outside world. We had done a lot of our homework, we’d even brought in outside consultants to kind of check the robustness and security of our platform. And so we felt confident going in that this is something that we could kind of get them to agree to the way we were doing it. And we were quickly disabuse of that notion that that was something that they were going to do. And so we recognized that we needed to go back to the drawing board a little bit on how we developed the integration and how we actually get the data into their control room environment.
And it turned out that some of that same evolution that was happening in our product around incorporating CFD and using that more sensor-based or sensor validated model approach turned out that that gave us some optionality around how we do the integration as well. Because once we were no longer directly tied to the real world or the real time sensor readings, it allowed us to build that model in a standalone way that was decoupled from the sensor and take that model and deploy it into the secure environment of the utility such that all they needed to do was bring in just regular weather data as an input. All of the ratings calculations would take place onsite within their secure environment. And the output is a dynamic line rating that goes straight into their EMS. And so when we came back to them with this more on-prem architecture that we had developed, you saw the blood pressure immediately drop for all of the folks that were focused on cybersecurity. They saw this and they recognized, you guys have listened to us, you know exactly what our problems are and you nailed it. So that was really a stepping stone for us to get to that next operational level.
Lara Pierpoint: And just to sort of clarify what that means then for the solution, I think this is so cool. It really is about, originally you were thinking we were going to have all these sensors out there and they’re constantly supplying data essentially into the control room to make decisions. And so instead now with this really incredible model that you all have ultimately trained and generated based on the work that you’ve done and all the pilots you’ve done over the years, they’re essentially just taking some weather data and then they’ve got a model that tells them operationally what to do and then you can just update that model periodically, right?
Karthik Rao: That’s exactly right. And so all of the actual calculations for the ratings are happening in their environment. And this is really important because what they don’t want is some bad actor with malicious intent hacking into the system, changing the ratings and potentially causing an overload of a line or something along those lines. We’ve essentially designed a system here that makes it impossible for that to happen.
Lara Pierpoint: LineVision reached a major milestone in 2022 operationalizing its technology, but that was just the first step toward getting out of pilot hell, after all, they were still doing pilots. But what about skipping the pilot altogether? We’ll get to that after the break. So we’ve talked a little bit about this transition from being a company that offers visibility to utilities into one that’s offering operational success, and there’s yet a third tier which you have also crossed, which is becoming the kind of company that can work with utilities without necessarily doing a pilot first, where basically you have done so many deployments and you’re so familiar to so many utilities that it becomes just a matter of course for utilities to start working with you. So can you talk a little bit about that transition? When was the first time that someone said, we want to put your system into operation and we don’t need to do a sort of initial pilot phase?
Karthik Rao: I believe that was in 2023 when Avangrid in New York State signed a project with us and the project from the initial get go included operationalization very much to the point you’re making. That was a pivotal moment for us because it showed us what a buying motion for this kind of technology might look like going forward where we don’t necessarily have to do a pilot for each individual utility and that there’s enough proof points out there that the technology is trusted and we can move straight into operationalizing. Now, I don’t want to overstate that there are still very much utilities that want to prove it out for themselves, but we are starting to see that the validation is taking place within the industry at a larger scale. And one of the things that’s nice about how utilities think is while they do tend to move slowly initially, they’re also not in competition with one another, which means that when they do find something that works and is repeatable, they talk to one another and they want to know about their successes, and when they see something working, they’ll start to do it too.
And that’s when you start to really start to see that hockey stick growth of utilities talking to one another and adopting a technology at a much greater scale. And I think we’re starting to enter that type of a situation right now where DLR is no longer this thing that is an unknown or just this sort of future technology that people kind of know about but don’t really understand to something that has been used that’s been proven, and there’s proof points that folks can point to that they can use to make that decision in a much faster way.
Lara Pierpoint: There are some things that differ about utilities in their approaches and some things that I think are probably really similar. So one of the things I’d really love to dig into as we think about the lessons learned and what it’s meant for you to kind of be successful within the utility industry, let’s talk about utility innovation teams and let’s talk about the question of really who you’re speaking to within the company. Because one of the problems that we had all the time at Exxon, I was fundamentally part of an innovation team. We had an amazing group of folks. We had a straight line of conversation to many of the key executives within the company, but there was still a pretty big chasm between us and the work we did, and the folks that fundamentally were operating the grid were doing the procurement in order to support those teams. And so crossing that gulf from us doing something that we were really excited about and understood and piloted into something that was actually going to become a part of the utility fabric was really challenging. So tell us a little bit about what your experience has been. Have you seen that repeated across utilities? And if so, how do you manage that and who do you talk to? Who’s in the room first? Who do you bring in later? How do you think about managing that challenge?
Karthik Rao: One thing that we’ve recognized is that at the end of the day, utilities are not going to adopt something because a pilot was successful in and of itself, nor are they going to adopt it because the technology is interesting or cool, they’re going to adopt it because they have real challenges that they’re trying to solve and the technology that you’re trying to sell to them is able to solve that problem. So when we think about how we made the transition from that pilot phase to the operational phase, it really is about understanding what those challenges are and making sure that we’ve connected the value that the technology can deliver to what those executives care about. And then once you’re doing that, then they can look to those innovation teams or those pilot projects that we’re done to get validation from those technical stakeholders that can essentially give them the green light and say, yep, we know that this works. From a technical standpoint, you’re essentially checking that box, right? If you care about the value proposition, then you want to know does the stuff work? And if you get that check box from your technical stakeholders that you trust, you can move forward with that business case conversation and that’s when you start getting into that broader conversation.
Lara Pierpoint: That makes a lot of sense. And so it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s kind of an order of operations that maybe you start with the innovation team you bring in probably as quickly as possible. I’m guessing the executives who kind of understand the business case for it, and then eventually you get to the technical and procurement people who operationalize it. Does that sound right or is it not that prescriptive?
Karthik Rao: Maybe the one thing I would change there is the technical folks are definitely going to be involved early. They’re some of the most important people to get buy-in first before you can even really have a commercial conversation. And to be clear, I am still talking about the kind of early days when you are still in that pilot world because if you don’t have that technical validation, the commercial stuff is not going to get far because they need the stuff to work first and foremost, as we get to more of the phase that we’re maybe entering in now in the lifecycle of our company where we have a number of proof points and we know that the category is well understood, we don’t necessarily have to engage with innovation departments in order to get our foot in the door and utility. And so a little bit to your earlier question of how do you skip that pilot phase and go straight to operational?
Well, hand in hand with that is this notion of we don’t necessarily have to start with the innovation department anymore. We could be starting with those executives from the get go and moving directly into an operational project. So it’s really for those companies that are starting out and need those innovation teams just to be able to prove out their technology, that’s where they need to work with those utility innovation teams, but also have the next two or three steps mapped out in your mind so that you can escape from that pilot feedback loop and actually get to that next level
Lara Pierpoint: When you’ve already alluded to a couple of things, but let’s talk for a second about some of the differences among utilities. So there’s some things that make them similar. So there are obvious obsession with keeping the lights on with reliability, their need to maintain compliance with the cybersecurity standards that NERC sets out for them. But what are some of the things that are different? I know some utilities are gigantic, some are tiny. Some have entire data science teams in their own employee, most don’t. Some still have paper maps of their transmission systems, others have everything fully digitized. So what are some of the biggest differences you see among utilities and to what extent are you adjusting your product or your business model as you get to each one? Does it tend to be something that you really have to think about and cater to or has it not been that way for you? All
Karthik Rao: The utilities that we work with the most tend to be the larger investor owned utilities, and they do have a lot of this information available. However, even within that subset of the market, there certainly can be a range of how up to date the record keeping might be. And this isn’t really to anyone’s fault, right? There’s over the years you go through different acquisitions from one utility territory to another, you go through different changes of systems, technology upgrades, what have you. And so you can’t necessarily expect that everything is just going to be available at a single click of a button. And so we do try to incorporate that into the expectations that we set both for ourselves and for our utility partners in terms of what the process is going to be. Now, ultimately, everything that we do is much, much simpler than what utilities are accustomed to doing.
And so at the end of the day, while it can be a little bit of a pain point to go through documentation around conductor properties, for example, the one thing that we hear in terms of feedback from our customers over and over again is that it’s a lot easier than they were expecting and there’s good reason for that. So they’re accustomed to doing large capital construction projects that take many, many years and go through all kinds of different approvals. We can install our sensors in like 15 minutes. So by developing a process that is really customer-centric and a technology that can be deployed easily, that’s really at the end of the day, what makes it a pleasure to work with us because we’re not necessarily adding a whole lot of additional work to their plate.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s very cool. So are you all thinking about from kind of a business model perspective, moving from just working with kind of the bigger investor-owned utilities into some of the smaller co-ops and the kinds of utilities that could probably really benefit from this but maybe don’t have the same level of resources, time, all those sorts of things? Is that on your map in terms of the sales cycle?
Karthik Rao: Potentially. But again, as a small company, we need to prioritize our efforts and there’s so much of the transmission system across the country that falls within the territory of those large investor owned utilities or IOUs. And so I think the natural adoption within the marketplace, and this is probably true of most utility technologies, is that it tends to start with the bigger ones. And as the ease of deployment and cost starts to come down and all of that good stuff happens, some of the smaller utilities, the munis and co-ops that may not have, for example, the budget for those innovation departments that we talked about and the ability to test out new technologies, those ones can look at what their larger peers have done, see that it works and start adopting it maybe a little bit later down the road. That’s not to say that that’s a perfectly serial process. There are some out there that are using it today, but I think by and large, when we think about the way in which the market matures, that’s the trajectory that I would expect to see.
Lara Pierpoint: All right. I have a fun wild card question for you. What is your level of belief in wireless electricity transmission, and would you all need to go found a new company if wireless electricity transmission takes over the world?
Karthik Rao: As someone who cares about the energy transition, I would love to see that happen. I am not concerned about its impact on LineVision’s market in the near term, I’ll put it that way. We are still, I would say, many, many years away from not having to rely on conductors to move electrons to where they need to go. And maybe this is just me offering my personal opinion. I am very much all for every technology that can help improve and modernize our electric system, but optimizing the transmission line is something that is going to be fundamental for the foreseeable future. I look forward to a time when DLR is just kind of a part of the grid that’s taken for granted and just a normal way we operate. And if ultimately we can replace those lines altogether, then even better. But I think we’re all a long way from that point.
Lara Pierpoint: I hear that. Karthik, this conversation has been awesome. I really appreciate your insights and particularly you’re telling us such key stories about your growth.
Karthik Rao: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been great.
Lara Pierpoint: Karthik Rao is the Vice President of Customer Success at LineVision. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Lara Pierpoint. Our producer is Erin Hardick. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you’d like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to The Green Blueprint at latitudemedia.com. You can listen to thegreenblueprint@latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy.
