Google's $3.2 billion acquisition of smart-home startup Nest in February "ought to give utility officials a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs" since it makes clear the Technarians have begun to seriously eye at least the periphery of utility business if not its core, said Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril Networks Inc. a Boulder, Colorado-based energy-services management company.
Google Energy
While coy about its ultimate energy ambitions, Google is already a power generator through more than $1.4 billion in clean energy investments and holds a wholesale power license. Last month it contributed $100 million to a program to promote rooftop solar power with SunPower Corp.
Nest, maker of the Learning Thermostat that memorizes and adjusts to users' preferences, gives Google a leap-ahead presence in the burgeoning smart-home market at the precise time that power in the U.S. has begun to flow both ways with the rise of rooftop solar and other forms of decentralized, home-grown energy, collectively called distributed generation.
Though Tuck said he has no special insight into Google's thinking, he believes that its Nest acquisition may well be a "Trojan horse" that gives Google a back door into the utility industry with the ability to leverage its smart thermostats into massive quantities of salable demand response even as it begins to compete directly with utilities with its own green-power projects.
