GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt Explains the $200M Smart Grid Fund

 

By Katie Fehrenbacher

It’s about speed, scale and making money, GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt told me in an exclusive interview in reference to GE’s $200 million smart grid fund that it unveiled on Tuesday at a splashy media event at the Bentley Reserve in downtown San Francisco. GE plans to offer up $100 million, with its venture capitalist partners doling out another $100 million, that will be invested into startups that have built the latest cutting edge smart grid technology.

While GE is no stranger to investing in greentech innovation — it’s poured some $175 million into 21 greentech companies and $5 billion into its own energy R&D — GE and its VC partners plan to identify their smart grid opportunities over the next 10 weeks. That gives entrepreneurs and startups only between now and mid-September to submit their ideas and plans to get access to the fund via GE’s website.

I asked Immelt why does GE and its VC partners, which includes Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital, Rockport Capital and Emerald Technology Ventures, feel the need to move so fast when finding these smart grid partners? Particularly in light of the fact that a time crunch potentially rushed the allocation of the stimulus funds for the smart grid as well as the DOE loan guarantees.