February 12, 2009
Mr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman & CEO
366 Walsh Road
Atherton, CA 94027
Dear Mr. Schmidt:
A series of recent articles, including a prominent one in the New York Times, shows your passion for energy conservation. Further, your family foundation addresses issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources. I do not have to tell you that fossil fuels are finite and that no matter what we do, they will be exhausted and can never be replaced.
By the year 2050 energy and potable water to sustain a world population of nearly 7.5 billion will be the greatest single challenge to the continuation of mankind as we know it today.
In this connection, Google has developed software and even some related hardware which provides energy use feedback and related cost data to utility customers. It is in this regard that I am writing you.
As I am sure you vividly recall, the people in California experienced blackouts and brownouts in Q1 2001. At the same time our company jumped in and by mid Q2 2001 we demonstrated the prototype of our product (please see enclosed brochure) to Senator Tom Torlakson of the East Bay who in turn authored Senate bill 1976 which authorized the CA Energy Commission and the CA Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to work together on a two year project to study pricing elasticity’s and pricing signals. This ultimately concluded with the CPUC order to the State’s three major investor owned utilities that they replace about 13 million old-fashioned electro- mechanical power meters with modern communicating meters and related metering infrastructure generally referred to as AMI.
Please take a minute and view our website at https://www.usclcorp.com and go to the USCL Leads section on the horizontal tool bar. Here we have spelled out the impact our company and the undersigned personally has had in California and the formulation of new rules, regulations, and the creation of new products and technologies. Specifically of interest is bullet item number seven as filled with the CPUC in August 2005. Embodied in that lengthy testimony is the minimal functionality required of any new meter to be used in an AMI configuration paid for by rate payers or tax payers. The technical specifications were first proposed in a white paper presented at an industry show in Las Vegas in May 2004. This body of work is what the Southern California Edison Meter requirements RFI and subsequent RFQ was virtually based on.
After reviewing this list of contributions to the State (and national) metering initiatives, please go to the news section and click on the WCBS New York City Channel 2 link and watch the CBS news interview with the undersigned here in Sacramento and the simple demonstration of the product. KPIX, Channel 5 in your area covered it as well.
Although providing the real time feedback of energy usage and related cost via an Internet Portal is very valid, our focus group research indicates that the biggest impact to consumers occurs when this information is provided on a remote display “in the customers face” so to speak, 24-7. The ideal configuration is a combination of both. The preference fragmentation follows lines of social economic, education, and generational backgrounds.
We have recently been granted key patent protection by the USPTO with claims involving communications from a meter to the utility and in turn to the customer display via a LAN. Many more claims are pending and additional applications are pending in China, Israel, and the European Union.
We are a privately held company. Along with the undersigned and his wife, our faithful PPO investor/shareholders funded us over this extended incubation period when VCs avoided utility related projects and certainly meter related projects resulting from the abuses of the failed automatic meter reading companies in the mid to late 90s who got the functionality and economics so very wrong.
We are looking for a very modest amount of money to complete the commercialization of the product and take it to field trials. We would like Google to invest in our efforts. Time is of the absolute essence now that the Federal government has signaled that it will begin to act of the Grid 2030 Vision plan to modernize the Transmission and Distribution system as part of the economic recovery plan. The Gird 2030 Vision Statement calls for the replacement of over 125 million electrical power meters nation wide with modern digital communicating meters with distributed intelligence. President Obama has made direct reference to 40 million “smart meters.”
In order for a meter to be smart it needs to do much more than even the newest low cost GE, Landis+Gyr, Elster, or Itron meter does. It needs to be part of a communication WAN to LAN network bringing information to the rate payer thereby turning him into a smart customer. This has been our vision and passion since 2001 and now the time is ripe to capitalize on our efforts and yours, and meet the public demand for this type of product.
We are lobbying at the Federal level to insure that any smart meter paid for from tax payer funds, regardless of the utility making the purchase and implementing the deployment, must have this basic communication interface with a universal protocol which we have long been advocating.
Our long term plans involve partnering with a substantial data base oriented software and communications company to build a utility billing services firm, differentiating ourselves from other hardware outfits by the emphasis on the consumer who ultimately pays the tab and build an enduring long term business operation with significant healthy recurring revenue. To that extent please go to the investors section of the https://www.usclcorp.com website, scroll down the NDA, fill in the data fields, and download the business plan, proformas, and long term funding plan (144A private bond circular.)
Again, time is of the essence. What we can offer is an ANSI compliant meter under glass (plastic) meeting utility and ANSI standards embodying the absolute best feature-function benefit cost ratio which is the power metering and communication node needed to gain significant market penetration and roll out the product en mass for the people who will benefit the most.
To the extent our firm’s cooperate we are more than willing to work exclusively with you and allow your use of any technology developed on an exclusive basis beyond our use.
Needless to say, conservation of fossil fuels is important. This leads to a corresponding reduction in Greenhouse Gas Emissions which many feel are contributing to global warming. Conservation reduces our dependency on foreign oil coming from unstable parts of the world. And perhaps most importantly as stated in the CBS News interview, “….conservation allows us a few more years to develop long term energy solutions…such as controlled nuclear fusion” The point is made that conservation is important and a matter of national security.
In addition to conservation it is very important that groups such as ours challenge the academic communities to model the future energy requirements in engineering units and the contribution of alternative energy sources such as solar, wind, tidal, bio-fuel, geo-thermal and the like can make on a practical basis. Unfortunately this has not been done and each of these “alternative energy” sources has greatly politicized the issue for self serving corporate gain. I have seen the work of a few very serious scientists who believe that collectively all these alternative sources can only contribute 5 to 8% of the world energy (including that for water) in the year 2050. I had a private meeting with James Woolsey, former Director of the U. S. CIA recently and I asked him if he knew of such studies. He said no and did not feel that was important. Later he gave a speech and stressed the importance of getting off foreign oil and the attributes of photo-voltaic produced energy. The point here is that the energy problem must be framed correctly and then the government will embark on a crash program to solve the problem once and for just as president Kennedy challenged the country and scientific/engineering communities to put a man on the moon in ten years and bring him back alive. Once “energy is correctly fixed” global warming is taken off the table. That issue simply goes away along with fossil fuels.
One very exciting functional capability of a properly constructed AMI system as part of the greater T & D grid is that it can be used to transmit all kinds of pictures, messages, etc., to the end user. The possibilities are enormous and can be used for energy education and a myriad of other applications. Of course this can be subscriber addressable to finely tune subscriber’s interests and content.
Please confirm receipt and review of this letter and insure that our request is acted on as soon as possible.
Thank you.
USCL Corporation
Tom D. Tamarkin
President & CEO
TDT/tt
Enclosures: Product brochure
Proforma package
Press Release & Patent