Green Tech: Peter Sobotka of Corinex On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On The Environment
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
By upgrading power lines with broadband, we help utilities manage new data flows created by renewables. For example, if an unpredicted storm suddenly darkens the sky over a solar installation, our technology enables utilities to learn of — and respond to — this event almost instantaneously and prevent a sudden power outage. On top of that, our technology also enables utilities to learn weather patterns and create self-directed energy systems. These machine learning capabilities require much more rapid and powerful data processing than most utilities are capable of. That’s where we come in.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Sobotka.
Dr. Peter Sobotka is a successful serial entrepreneur who built his first company from an initial investment of $700 to $130 million. He has since made over $300 million in direct sales and published over 20 research papers and books. He is the current Chair of the BPL Task Force for the PRIME Alliance, as well as the Chair of The Technical Committee of the National Electricity Roundtable in Canada. Peter holds a PhD in Applied Physics, with completed fellowships at Texas A&M University, and Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in the middle-class Slovak family of mixed origin; my grandparents resided in Vienna and Budapest and were of Austrian, Ukrainian and Jewish descent. My entire family hated Communism. The regime had nationalized my father’s small toy factory and my grandfather’s restaurant; another one of my uncles was in prison because he tried to emigrate. Given my family’s deeply rooted resistance to the Communist regime, I was raised to be free spirited and to challenge authority and the system. So, despite being one of the best students through both high school and university, I was always in permanent conflict with the Communist administration.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I founded Corinex as a strong believer in broadband powerline (BPL) technology and its benefits for utilities. I’ve spent a large part of my career and my money to develop it and create a market against legacy narrow band solutions. It took many years for the technology to mature. About a billion dollars was invested into our huge competitors whose massive R&D departments tried in vain to make the technology work. By 2018, Corinex remained as the sole major survivor and even Gartner forecast that BPL would become obsolete before reaching a plateau. Facing this bleak situation and negative outlook, I received an unexpected call from the PRIME ALLIANCE to start BPL standardization within its organization! This important organization, an alliance of 60 vendors and major utilities, had been our Goliath archrival representing narrowband technology. I remember tears in my eyes when I got the call from the alliance’s General Secretary. I felt recognition and acknowledgment of my vision, and this marked the inflection point of the industry after which a major E.ON mass rollout and ITU standardization followed.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My math professor Vladimir Horvath was a genius. He helped me understand my own skills, limitations, and taught me modesty. We spent a lot of time together discovering the capabilities of the first PCs, and with his encouragement, I created the first program enabling printing on laser printers in the Slovak language, a program which became mainstream in the whole country. When lecturing, Horvath would often find mistakes in math textbooks so he’d close them and write out entire chapters on the board. The man was brilliant, it took him minutes to resolve problems on which I had been working for days. Working with him, I realized that I was not talented enough to make leading theoretical discoveries and that my talents were in technological innovation and application.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Champions keep playing until they get it right. Then they play more.” Billie Jean King
I believe it takes both learning and perseverance to win. There are many industries which start with a relatively small number of “champions”, and which require a lot of learning to make a breakthrough discovery. Such were the beginnings of the discovery of flight, and I believe, the development of our technology for the management of efficient energy networks. Whole new industries and even economies are created when a relatively small group of innovators try again and again, until finally, there’s a monumental breakthrough.
You are a successful business leader. Which three-character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The ability to learn and change. I praise hard work. I used to work incredibly long hours over the years; I have a tremendous amount of energy and I use it with abandon. When I was working in Japan on my doctoral thesis, that was the only time in my life I came across people who could work with such ferocity and with as little sleep as I’m used to. However, the ability to reflect on life and take a step back is still more important. While in Japan, despite being one of the world’s foremost researchers in my field, I decided to refocus my time toward business as it offered a more interesting life for me and my family.
The second trait is just as important: perseverance. I’ve been able to find success in my life because I never give up. I keep pushing to the absolute limit of what my body and mind can endure. For instance, in 2009, the semiconductor chip provider on which our products depended went under; however, I never lost the faith in my goal — to create broadband powerline solutions that could change the world for the better. After years of research and development into alternative semiconductor-based solutions, our perseverance has paid off, allowing Corinex to get into an exclusive position with a validated and soon to be standardized product.
Lastly, I have a knack for being a great salesperson because I am authentic. I believe in personal integrity and building trust based on a proven track record. Customers feel it. I can think laterally about any given situation and provide a barrage of arguments to justify outcomes I trust in. Simply put, I have a very emotionally intuitive understanding of what a client wants before a client even wants it. This ability has made me a good salesperson and has always propelled me far ahead of the competition.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on the planet and the environment. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
For the first time in history, new technological investments and government incentives are making clean energies like wind and solar as affordable as fossil fuel sources, and people are rapidly adopting renewable energy sources. The clean energy shift is welcome and necessary, but we’re overlooking an essential component as we implement it: grid infrastructure.
Simply put, our power grids are designed for an era that’s ending — one in which power is generated from large-scale, centralized coal and oil and gas plants. The new solar, wind and EV battery storage technologies that are coming are often smaller-scale and more highly distributed. They also generate a lot more data and demand greater data management. In short, most power grids are built to transfer electricity. Now they also need to transfer large amounts of data, to handle the new challenges caused by the clean energy shift.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Much of the power sector runs on the equivalent of dialup internet — communication is happening, but not at the speed and reliability demanded in the modern era. By upgrading power lines with broadband, we help utilities manage new data flows created by renewables. For example, if an unpredicted storm suddenly darkens the sky over a solar installation, our technology enables utilities to learn of — and respond to — this event almost instantaneously and prevent a sudden power outage. On top of that, our technology also enables utilities to learn weather patterns and create self-directed energy systems. These machine learning capabilities require much more rapid and powerful data processing than most utilities are capable of. That’s where we come in.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
In 2014 I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that vividly showcased some awful predictions about human-caused climate change: animal populations have fallen by around 52%, foreshadowing a human-caused mass extinction in the next few decades. As a father of four children, I felt that I wanted to play a proactive part in solving this looming environmental catastrophe. This prompted me to reinvent my company, so I shifted the company’s focus away from consumer communication devices towards research and development of energy management and energy network efficiency solutions. I’m a physicist by training, so quite early on, it became clear to me that to move away from fossil fuel powered economies, we would have to completely reinvent our highly centralized energy distribution networks. I see a huge opportunity in the implementation of decentralized and democratized energy networks.
How do you think this might change the world?
Our work in Germany is a good example of how our technology can change the world. In that country, renewables and smart meters to maximize energy efficiency are widely used and poised for steady growth. Our partner E.ON is using our technology to ensure they can provide clean power without disruptions. We believe other countries will make a similar transition — more renewables adoption, followed by broadband upgrades to handle them. At Corinex, we’re making the behind-the-scenes technology upgrades needed to make widespread adoption of renewable energy possible.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
As energy networks become fully digitalized, the energy grid will become incredibly complex and interconnected. Simply put, the energy in your EV that is parked in your garage at night may end up powering your neighbor’s dishwasher or the midnight train as it passes by (and vice versa). The number of energy transfers that will become possible is almost infinite. This interconnectivity is incredibly useful for minimizing energy waste; however, having access to a nation’s entire energy distribution networked in real time has an obvious “Black Mirror” risk: security. As we’ve seen over the last decade, governments have often come under cyber-attack from state and non-state actors. It is conceivable to think that hackers could hold a country ransom by attacking its critical infrastructure. But let’s not be alarmed prematurely. Before deployments, our products and software always pass some of the strictest security tests that are designed to ensure that it is resilient to malicious tampering.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
- Know that the problem you are addressing is substantial; every successful business starts by fulfilling a client’s need.
- Put together a very competent team. People are key.
- Think big; think about how a technology can make a huge impact in the aggregate. Often the most scalable ideas are extremely simple.
- Think incrementally; start somewhere and keep iterating until it’s the best it can be. Don’t forget to start.
- Create a company structure that is transparent and motivating.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I’d probably tell them that it is in their best interest to do so and that the most important thing is to start. In the process they will learn where they can make their impact and that every contribution matters. I would also suggest questioning conventional modes of thinking and authority. It is precisely through disagreement with the status quo that truly disruptive innovation happens. Real entrepreneurship is a process of creative destruction. If you’re surrounded by too many friends and allies, you’re probably doing something quite mainstream, and something that isn’t, in my humble opinion, very interesting.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?
I would love to have a private breakfast with the Wright brothers. I feel an affinity to them because I feel like they were conquering a problem of the same magnitude as I. They found a breakthrough to a problem that, just as in my industry, had caused many others to fail. And yet their achievement had a profound impact for all of humankind. I feel the same responsibility to succeed as they did, as I don’t believe that we can achieve a sustainable energy future without intelligent broadband powerline systems.
The Wright brothers spent their lives testing practical solutions to build planes at a time when people didn’t see a pressing need for them, just as most people did not see the need for broadband in the utility industry. It has taken decades and about a billion dollars to make a viable BPL solution, and to make people understand that it is necessary to make decarbonization happen.
I would like to talk to them, because some innovative breakthroughs require more than just money, they require true perseverance to succeed.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Readers can visit our website for more information, including deeper dives into how we apply broadband technology to the power sector!
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
