June 10, 2014, 8:36am EDT

Imergy CEO Bill Watkins: Batteries will democratize energy

Enlarge Image » Former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins

Bill Watkins, head of battery technology company Imergy, believes the utility grid is ripe for an overhaul. Vicki Thompson

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Jon Xavier
Technology Reporter
Silicon Valley Business Journal
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The UpTake: Bill Watkins, CEO of Imergy, says he wants his battery technology company to aim for nothing less than upending the grid.

B ill Watkins got his start in computer storage, running the disk drive giant Seagate. Now he's the CEO of Imergy Power Systems Inc., which superficially is in a very different technology space: flow batteries for storing electricity on the grid and in people's homes.

Yet electricity storage and computer storage do have something in common, he says: They're both enablers for innovation. While cheap data storage ushered in the era of the PC and democratized computing by letting software developers run things locally rather than on big mainframes, battery technology has the potential to democratize electricity by letting consumers generate and store their own power, leading to decentralized "microgrids" and limiting the power of the utilities.

Imergy is venture backed, with about $53 million in funding from NEA, BlueRun Ventures and Technology Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Element Partners.

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He outlines vision for how his company and others like it in the Silicon Valley are working to change the world.

You’ve said that batteries are going to democratize energy production. Why?

Right now energy production is a really centralized market, and we actually think that batteries will let you decentralize it. Once you put a battery on a solar array, particularly in California, if you can do that, it changes the game fundamentally.

If you think about it, today your battery is the grid. Everyone who has solar is hooked up to the grid. Everyone who has wind, hooked up to the grid. You have to be, and that’s by design, because when you generate electricity that you don’t use it goes onto the grid, and the operators want to be your battery. But it’s also a problem, because when the grid goes down, everything goes down with it.

Jon Xavier
Jon Xavier
Technology Reporter


