The clean energy grid

The David Energy mission is to run the grid 100% on clean energy. This happens by empowering homes and businesses everywhere to power themselves as effectively as possible – leading to lower costs, more reliable power, and a completely clean energy system.

The clean energy challenge

Today, renewables are the cheapest source of power we can create. When they are producing electricity the generation costs are effectively zero, because there are no fuel costs.

However, renewables like solar and wind are intermittent – meaning that there is no way to control when they produce electricity (i.e. when the sun shines and the wind blows). Currently, when renewables are not producing enough low-cost electricity to meet the demand of the grid, those gaps are filled by generating electricity from expensive fossil fuels like gas.

Most of the current grid infrastructure is outdated and not designed to work with these intermittencies, causing outages and expensive challenges. This is why electricity costs to consumers are not decreasing as quickly as low-cost renewable energy generation is increasing.

The distributed grid

Utilizing the low-cost electricity of renewables as effectively as possible and removing the need for these fossil fuels can be accomplished through something called the distributed grid. This means that instead of many homes consuming electricity from a few large power plants, much more power is generated on-site at those homes from things like rooftop solar. This is already happening today, but it’s still not able to completely eliminate the need for fossil fuels. 

That’s where smart electricity comes in. By connecting the smart devices that produce and consume energy in thousands of homes, the grid becomes much more flexible – adapting in real time to what’s happening across the network. Power, particularly renewables, is used more efficiently and effectively, reducing costs for homeowners and decreasing the frequency of outages. The more homes that join the network, the more effective it becomes: Continuing to reduce the need for fossil fuels and make electricity more and more affordable over time.