Over the course of my career I have had the good fortune to work with a number of role models and mentors who taught me valuable lessons about leadership and normally I would draw on them for thoughts in preparation for the conference.   However, this invitation came my way at the start of baseball season – a time of year when my mind is preoccupied with the optimism of a new season.  So, I decided to go with the flow and frame my comments within the context of our national pastime.  That’s when my plans took an unexpected turn.

Despite all of the legendary on- and off-field leadership examples in the sport, my train of thought kept returning to an unlikely source — my son’s baseball coach.   The thought stubbornly persisted so I asked myself what qualities in Coach Robinson were conveying such a strong impression of leadership.   After taking a mental inventory of our interactions I was able to build a solid list of his qualities, but still had not put my finger on why him and not someone in the hall of fame.

Then I realized I was looking for my answer in the wrong place.

When I stopped looking for signs of leadership in Coach Robinson, and started thinking about his players, I had my answer.

Every kid on that team believed they played an important role in the shared vision of the team – to win the Pennsylvania state championship.  His leadership was not about the strategies of the coach or the skill of star players.  It was about building a sense of participation and self-confidence in every player.  Over and over I watched Coach Robinson talk to each kid about their individual contributions, then put them into games in critical situations without hesitation.   Even on days when my son was not pitching, I would hear the coach holler across the diamond “Hey Muss, get loose, we are going to need you.”  He made everyone part of every victory.

In my opinion, this was the secret to leadership. He made me realize that my job had less to do with getting people to believe in me; and more to do with getting them to believe in themselves.  Thinking about it, I probably had already learned this lesson many years ago.  I had forgotten that the most enduring memories of my own mentors were not grounded in things they did, but rather in the things they got me to do.  I was reminded of it last year when I watched a veteran baseball coach inspire a group of high school seniors to achieve a vision.

I learned a lot last year watching Coach Robinson and believe his lessons on leadership will be well received when I share them with my colleagues in Montreal:

1.  Leadership is found by looking at who is following.
2. Leadership is cultivated by promoting a sense of confidence not a sense of awe
3. Leadership is measured by the contributions of the team, not the accomplishments of the leader.

So, thanks Coach Robinson, not only for teaching my son and his fellow players a thing or two about life, but also thanks for reminding me about an important leadership lesson.

Bethlehem Area School District increases energy savings by “lowering energy peaks” with technology from Tangent Energy Solutions

 Technology will save BASD approx. $326,000 over three years

Kennett Square, PA (April 30, 2012) – Tangent Energy Solutions today announced a deal with Bethlehem Area School District (BASD) to provide a technology/service platform that will cut approximately $326,800 from the district’s energy bill over the next three years.

The new technology will actively manage the district’s energy use to avoid pricing premiums and capitalize on economic opportunities tied to changing conditions on the energy grid.  The platform works together with the 1.6MW solar energy system installed at five district schools last year, also from Tangent.

As the energy industry increasingly relies on customers to help relieve grid stress and congestion, savvy customers like BASD are finding increased opportunities to lower their energy bills.  The combination of clean, on-site generation with active management technology moves the district to the cutting edge of energy cost control strategies.

“In addition to reaping direct energy savings from the five solar energy systems, we will now begin leveraging Tangent’s expertise to increase our savings by actively managing our electricity demand,” said Mark Stein, PE Director of Facilities and Operations at BASD.  “With school budgets coming under fire during these economic times, the ability to have increased control over our energy costs is essential.”

D’Huy Engineering, which prepared and manages the BASD master energy plan, represented the district in the project.

“Because energy markets are so complex, most customers manage costs by just focusing on what’s happening inside their facility,” said Dean Musser, President and CEO of Tangent Energy Solutions.  “Bethlehemis among a growing number of empowered customers that realize the rewards of combining facility management with electric grid management.”

Like the solar assets, the active management technology is provided at zero cost to the school.

Contact:               

Jess Long for Tangent – 717-214-2200; 717-712-8359

Mark Stein for BASD –  610-867-8635

About Tangent Energy Solutions

Tangent Energy Solutions (www.tangentenergy.com) reverses the traditional utility driven approach to developing the smart grid by partnering with commercial and industrial customers to optimize the “grid behind the meter.” By providing clean energy assets and technologies at no capital cost, Tangent saves C&I energy customers 10% to 20% while increasing the amount of renewable content in their supply. Tangent actively manages on-site assets to decrease a customer’s reliance on grid sourced energy, especially during peak demand periods.  As a result both the end-customer and the utilities benefit.   Tangent is a venture-backed company founded in 2009 by a management team that has been providing commercially successful energy innovations to mainstream C&I customers for 30 years.

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Tangent has grown tremendously in the past year with revenue rising from just $100,000 in 2010 to $14 million in 2011, to projected revenue of $77 million for 2012.

“Tangent Energy joins a long list of high growth companies based in Pennsylvania using innovation and science to better serve their customers,” said Kelly Lewis, President of TechQuest Pennsylvania. “We’re pleased to recognize Tangent as the Growth Company of the Year.”

Last month Tangent, announced a three-year deal with Colonial School District in Montgomery County to reduce energy costs by more than $166,400 during that period.  Tangent also has numerous industrial projects under construction, and in its pipeline.

“We are extremely honored to receive this award from the Central Pennsylvania Technology Council,” said Dean Musser, President and CEO of Tangent. “Our company represents a new energy solutions model for commercial and industrial companies with complex energy systems — one that empowers customers to economically benefit from predicting and managing demand peaks in their facilities and on the energy grid.”

Musser continued to explain that Tangent uses on-site generation assets and a proprietary technology platform to balance a customer’s supply and demand in a way that lowers costs and generates revenue from energy market participation, without interfering with normal business operations.

Musser recently took his first leap into the world of energy blogging – launching “On a Tangent.”

The blog’s name refers to Musser’s energy philosophy that the customer point-of-view is underrepresented – to the point where it seems off-topic – in an industry so heavily focused on utility and infrastructure issues.  He believes that this needs to change if we want to solve our country’s energy issues.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Two years before organizing the nation’s first volunteer fire company, Ben Franklin coined the above expression in an anonymous letter to his own newspaper.  On February 4, 1735 the Philadelphia Gazette published a letter from an “old citizen” about fire safety that read in part:

Ben Franklin in a helmet from the Union Fire Company which he founded.

“In the first Place, as an Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure, I would advise ‘em to take care how they suffer living Coals in a full Shovel… you may be forced, (as I once was) to leap out of your Windows, and hazard your Necks to avoid being oven-roasted”

It’s instructive that the founder of one of our most critical emergency response institutions also provided such enduring advice on the merits of a proactive vs. reactive outlook.

This month, Demand Response (DR), which has become the emergency response resource for our nation’s energy grid, now has a more proactive counterpart.

On April 1,  PJM Interconnection – the regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in Pennsylvania, all or part of 12 other states and D.C. – became the first power pool to comply with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) 745 order to open an economic market for Demand Response.

Other regions asked for more time to work out implementation details and will open similar markets in the near future.

Demand Response is an incentive program offered by PJM, and other power pools that provides financial incentives to customers that agree to reduce power consumption.

Until April, DR was more or less defined by the capacity market, where customers are compensated for being prepared to reduce energy usage by pre-determined levels when called upon to do so.  The goal of capacity DR is to avoid dangerous system overloads that could lead to outages.

Intermediary companies called Curtailment Service Providers (CSPs) administer the DR programs for the power pools by recruiting customers, providing notifications and processing payments.

Economic DR also compensates customers for reducing energy usage but unlike capacity Demand Response, which reacts to grid emergencies by curtailing large amounts of energy (a pound of cure), economic Demand Response allows customers to respond to pricing opportunities and encourages smaller, more frequent reductions that provide ongoing corrections to demand on the grid (an ounce of prevention).

The key provision of FERC 745 that made economic DR attractive to customers was setting the price of “negawatts” equal to “megawatts.”  A “negawatt” is an unofficial measurement of the amount of energy consumption reduced from the grid by customers.

FERC 745 and economic DR are good news, especially for C&I energy customers, because they give companies more control over the timing and level of DR participation.

Instead of being blindsided by crippling curtailment commitments that were made up to a year in advance and called with as little as one-hour of notice; economic Demand Response features customer-determined energy curtailment levels with 24-hour lead times.  As capacity DR events are being called more frequently, these distinctions are important to maintaining normal business operations.

In addition to benefiting energy customers, economic DR is also helpful to utilities and power pools because it encourages practices that reduce the risk of grid emergencies.

Think of capacity Demand Response as grid insurance that is underwritten by customers.  Most of the time, the underwriter is paid a “premium” for standing ready to reduce energy in response to a grid emergency.  Unless an actual emergency event occurs, the underwriter/customer profits but actual grid conditions remain unchanged.    On the other hand, economic Demand Response acts more like energy grid maintenance by rewarding customers for providing on-going relief to the energy grid.

The opening of economic Demand Response markets will have a positive impact on the industry, and make DR an even more useful smart grid resource. But, it will also mean change. Strategies and skill sets needed for success in the capacity DR market are different than those needed by economic DR providers.

Whereas the former deploys a large marketing and sales effort to amass stockpiles of megawatts that may never be called into use; the latter requires engineers and certified energy managers to regularly dispatch customer load in the market.  Leading CSPs that built their businesses based on the capacity DR model will have to retool their organizations to participate successfully in these new markets.

There will always be a need for an emergency response mechanism on the grid, just like there will always be a need for fire departments.

But as the energy industry continues to embrace a proactive approach, look for new DR providers who focus less on imposing curtailment burdens on Demand Response customers and more on empowering customers to demand responsibly.

Kennett Square-based Tangent Energy Solutions, an energy solutions provider that manages commercial and industrial customers’ energy resources during peak demand periods, and Pittsburgh cloud provider Sierra w/o Wires, were big winners at last Friday’s TechQuest Awards in Harrisburg.

Tangent Energy Solutions earned Growth Company of the Year, besting finalists Red Privet and Phoenix Contact. Sierra w/o Wires took home the other big prize, Technology Company of the Year, besting Hewlett Packard Company and Department of Public Welfare and DSS.

Just last month Tangent Energy Solutions announced a three-year deal with Colonial School District to manage the district’s peak energy use and reduce energy costs by $166,400 over that period. The Chester County firm, established in 2007, installed solar energy assets at three schools there last year that could save $1.5 million over 20 years.

Read the full story here.

Before going too far down the road on the “killer app” theme, I wanted to be sure that someone outside the category had used the terms “Demand Response” and “killer app” in the same sentence.  I did a quick Google search and found that none other than current FERC chairman Jon Wellinghoff used the phrase in this January, 2009 Smart Electric News article:

“According to FERC Commissioner Jon Wellinghoff, who leads the Commission’s efforts in the Collaborative Dialogue on DR with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, DR is clearly the ‘killer application’ for the smart grid.”

Interestingly, the reference was made in a report that pointed to potential obstacles for Demand Response as indicated in this excerpt from the same article:

“The report, 2008 Assessment of Demand Response and Advanced Metering, while notes progress on overcoming regulatory and financial hurdles over the past three years, also points to continuing obstacles – the limited number of retail customers on time-based rates, restrictions on customer access to meter data and the scale of financial investment necessary to deploy enabling technologies during an economic downturn – that could limit opportunities for continued growth in these programmes.”

Fast forward to 2011 and Chairman Wellinghoff had it right; DR was headed for obstacles:

• Leading DR companies traded at or near 52 week lows.
• Measurement practices were called into question in PJM, the country’s largest power pool.
• Customers loudly complained about curtailment programs.
• In PJM, for the first time ever, DR companies failed to deliver 100% of curtailment commitments.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs made this comment in a 1994 Rolling Stone Magazine article.  He was responding to an interviewer who asked if he had as much faith in technology as he did when he started out 20 years earlier.  At a time when the rest of the computer industry was answering similar questions in terms of processing power, storage capacity and transmission speeds, Jobs was focused on the real breakthrough – customer involvement.

In the second half of a career that prematurely ended last October, Jobs used this philosophy to change the way the world consumed and interacted with information – not by making gadgets faster and more powerful – but by making people want gadgets that were faster and more powerful.

As our industry increasingly turns to technology to change the way we interact with and consume energy it’s alarming that this key insight from the most influential technologist of our time is not evidenced more often.  I’m amazed at the amount of editorial space the media and bloggers dedicate to technology companies releasing third and fourth generations of a platform that never found a market in the first place… (and for that matter, how much venture funding they receive).

I’m not saying that that technology companies are not newsworthy, they are – as providers of the tools of progress.  At the end of the day, energy customers will decide if the smart grid succeeds or fails, or is even built; which brings me around to why I’m writing this blog.

For the last 30+ years as an energy industry entrepreneur I’ve tried to build companies that help large institutional and industrial companies innovate their energy systems in order to lower costs and improve operations.

I can’t say this experience has made me an expert on technology, but I am pretty familiar with the energy systems, safety procedures, and operational priorities of large energy users; and their relationship to utilities and the energy grid.  More importantly, I’ve built long-standing relationships with THE PEOPLE who are expected to buy and use these new technologies.

Big thinkers in the industry occasionally seek out my opinion on trends and investments in the energy industry.  Over the years some of them suggested that my perspectives on these issues might be interesting to others, so I started this blog.

I’m calling the blog “On a Tangent” for two reasons: because the name of our company is Tangent Energy Solutions; and as a friendly chide to an industry that sometimes treats the customer point-of-view as an off-topic departure to the larger conversation.

In my next entry I’ll discuss how Demand Response came close to getting it right with customers…until it started doing it so wrong.

Until then, the following provides a larger excerpt of the Rolling Stone interview with Steve Jobs as well as a link to full article.

“Nevertheless, you’ve often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Oh, sure. It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.

Explain that.
Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. It’s not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/steve-jobs-in-1994-the-rolling-stone-interview-20110117

Weber’s energy industry and investment experience complements the backgrounds of Tangent’s existing board which is comprised of leading executives, regulatory officials and venture investors from the energy sector. Laurel Capital Partners is focused on growth equity and buyout investments in companies with platform potential. 

Prior to co-founding Laurel Capital in 2007, Weber was a Partner at MVP Capital Partners.  Weber came to MVP from Mirant Corporation, an independent energy company based in Atlanta.  While at Mirant, Weber distinguished himself as an analyst in the company’s internal venture capital group where he focused on new business opportunities and prospective acquisitions. 

“Laurel Capital’s investment in Tangent reflects our explosive growth in 2011, and strong book of business already closed for 2012,” said Dean Musser, CEO of Tangent.  “Jay’s energy industry background and M&A expertise adds to the depth of experience on our board.  We’re excited to have him on our team.” 

Tangent is an energy solutions company that saves commercial and industrial (C&I) energy customers 20%+ by actively managing customer energy resources during peak demand periods on the grid.  The offering consists of a technology suite and clean, on-site generation assets that empower customers to anticipate and reduce the impact of costly energy peaks without disrupting normal business operations. Tangent is currently operating, or has firm commitments to provide more than 34MW of on-site renewable energy projects with an additional 110MW in active discussion.

“I invested in Tangent because I’m impressed with the company’s experienced management team, rapid growth and strong value proposition to the customer,” said Weber.  “I’m pleased to be joining a board with such impressive members.”

Weber holds an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and a Bachelor’s degree from Wake Forest University.  He resides in Wayne, PA.

Tangent is based in Kennett Square, PA.

About Tangent Energy Solutions

Tangent Energy Solutions (www.tangentenergy.com) reverses the traditional utility driven approach to developing the smart grid by partnering with commercial and industrial customers to optimize the “grid behind the meter.” By providing clean energy assets and technologies at no capital cost, Tangent saves C&I energy customers 20 percent while increasing the amount of renewable content in their supply. Tangent actively manages on-site assets to decrease a customer’s reliance on grid sourced energy, especially during peak demand periods.  As a result, both the end-customer and the utilities benefit. Tangent is a venture-backed company founded in 2009 by a management team that has been providing commercially successful energy innovations to mainstream C&I customers for 30 years.

EnerTech Capital is pleased to announce that Scott Ungerer has been asked to broaden his role within the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) to become Chairman of a new working group. As the head of the Business Sustainment Plan Working Group, Ungerer will lead the planning and implementation of the transition of the SGIP from a fully government-funded entity toward a privately-funded organization.

“I’m very excited to have this new and more involved role with the SGIP,” said Ungerer. “Efficient energy use and Grid reliability, interactivity and functionality are all very important to our national energy security, and SGIP is enabling all Smart Grid stakeholders to work together to accomplish our common goal as quickly and efficiently as possible, including collaboration with similar organizations across the world.”

Ungerer is also Chairman of The Nanosteel Company and sits on the boards of CURRENT Group and Tangent Energy Solutions. He is also a member, and recent past Chairman, of the Venture Capital Advisory Board for the National Renewable Energy Lab. He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University.

Read the full story here.

Tangent Energy Solutions has announced a three-year deal with Colonial School District, to provide a technology/service platform that actively manages the district’s peak energy usage. The platform will reduce Colonial’s energy costs by approximately $166,400 over that period.

“Colonial is taking a very sophisticated approach to managing demand that was made possible by our ongoing partnership,” said Dave Turner, COO of Tangent Energy Solutions. “Terry (Yemm) and George (Donofry) of Colonial are ahead of most in understanding this concept, and the school district will benefit from their vision.”

Like the solar assets, the technology is provided at zero cost to the school.

Read the full story here.