The start-up companies that will build the smart energy grid
A system that will cut US energy consumption for everyone
By Dan Fost
Photo courtesy of EnerNOC
The electric meters on the outside of your house haven’t changed in nearly a century. They’re stark symbols of a utility system that’s riddled with outdated practices and age-old inefficiencies. But now a handful of startups are pushing to create a “smart grid” that could discourage excess energy use by both utilities and consumers.
These companies stand at the heart of a broad and powerful push to reduce energy consumption and deliver it more efficiently. In the fight to reduce global emissions, this initiative could prove even more critical than developing new and renewable forms of energy; it tackles the demand-side issues, where people use it, rather than the supply side, where it’s generated. “The global potential for saving energy is huge,” says Gro Harlem Brundtland, the United Nations’ Special Envoy on Climate Change, at a Nordic Investment Bank colloquium held in New York earlier this year. “The US has half the energy efficiency of Japan, and China only has one-ninth.”
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