Seth Frader-Thompson (pictured left): My original inspiration came from driving a rented Prius. I was fascinated by the Prius dashboard and how it provides the driver with real time feedback about how driving style impacts mileage and performance. That experience made me ask myself why there wasn’t a similar kind of dashboard for home energy consumption. And I decided that it was a great time in my own career to start a new company that would have a real global impact. So I founded EnergyHub with a vision of combining intelligent technology and green awareness to make it easier for consumers to manage energy consumption. Right now, green energy is one of the most rewarding spaces I can imagine working on – it provides an opportunity to have a really positive impact on social issues and people’s lives.

 

SFT: That’s a great question. I agree that there are a lot of companies in the general smart energy space, but most of them are not working on the same type of home energy control and monitoring as EnergyHub. Even more important, it’s a market still in a very early stage of adoption, meaning that most homes don’t have energy monitoring yet. That means the real challenge is to educate the market and drive consumer adoption.

 

Until recently, energy monitoring solutions were largely designed by engineers and for engineers. Those products were not easy to use. The vast majority of users didn’t ever program their programmable thermostats; many consumers just leave the thermostat at a constant temperature whether they are home or not. EnergyHub focused on human factors to create an interface that makes the Dashboard easy to integrate with a consumer’s daily life. We have 3 very intuitive options in the form of buttons on the control screen: HOME AWAY and GOODNIGHT When a user pushes AWAY, the system will put house into “sleep” mode by turning down the thermostat, turning off the hot water heater automatically and adjusting other appliances to cut back on power use.

 

Another very important differentiator is that EnergyHub provides control and not just monitoring of energy use.

 

MC: How does the control feature work?

 

SFT: The EnergyHub solution is actually a suite of products that includes a smart thermostat, smart electricity sockets and a smart strip to plug in appliances around the house, as well as a heavy duty controller with a high capacity that goes in a boiler room. These products can connect wirelessly to the smart meter. For homes that don’t have a smart meter, EnergyHub can use a direct connection to the electric panel that is installed by an electrician. The Dashboard is the hub of the system and it provides the user with a single point of interaction to all the power use in the house, from appliances to the smart thermostat and water heater.

 

 

SFT: Our value comes down to fulfilling our company motto, to become “the consumer face of the Smart Grid, helping homeowners reduce energy consumption and save money.”

 

That means we will provide everything needed by consumers to easily manage their energy consumption, from the Dashboard home installation to a web interface and access on mobile devices. We can also help the utilities with customer relationship management. The old-style utility just had a billing relationship with customers. With smart meters supporting demand response capabilities and time of use pricing, that relationship is very different. There is an opportunity for utilities to become a trusted partner in conserving residential energy consumption along with a risk that customers may perceive energy monitoring by utilities as some kind of big brother interference. EnergyHub highlights the positive benefits of smart metering and provides information that the consumers want to access in a form that is easy to understand and to use. We provide a foundation for the utilities to redefine their customer communications to make them more interactive and service oriented.

 

 

SFT: I think they are definitely complementary. For example, Google (News - Alert) works with utilities to put aggregated power consumption data online and then makes it available to an individual consumer. That’s great for a quick summary glance by the consumer, or for tracking trends over time. But Power Meter today is limited to overall aggregate energy use –it doesn’t provide the level of service that EnergyHub offers, like a breakdown of how much power is used by each home appliance and a one-touch control to adjust energy settings.

 

 

SFT: I see the need for both utility based installations and direct to consumer sales, depending on the policies of local utilities and varied state regulations. Some utilities prefer to buy the smart monitoring equipment and deliver it to their customers. Other utilities want to seed the market to get some early users, and after that they want the retail and direct sales channels to take over for mass market adoptions. Today the utility channel is the best way to reach customers but over time I expect that retail will be the primary channel.

 

Today, we are looking at educational outreach to build the market. That requires close partnerships with both retailers and utilities to figure out how to get consumers to understand the product category and its benefits.

 

 

SFT: This year we are aiming at creating the direct to consumer channel and building it to scale In the first half of 2010 we plan to open up a beta project. By the end of 2010, we hope to make EnergyHub products available at retail stores and more broadly on our own Web site.

 

 

SFT: On the utility side, the most important goal for 2010 and beyond is execution on every project to create a track record for excellent performance. We have a great reputation today; utilities and consumers both love our product in the pilot projects we have launched. Our challenge for future growth is to demonstrate that we can scale into mass market installations and maintain our track record for quality and ease of use. To accomplish this, we will continue to build out our partner ecosystem. We already have a number of great strategic partners including Itron and Cisco (News - Alert) and we expect to develop more.