When I had breakfast recently with Ron Pitt, he pointed out that there are only about 100 or so major, investor-owned utilities in the United States—but there are roughly 70 million owner-occupied single-family homes.
So why, in the name of God’s greenhouse gases, are so many venture-backed startups focused on developing cleantech innovations and smart grid technologies for sale to utilities?
It’s a rhetorical question, but Pitt has a point. “People keep wanting to turn the smart grid into the next Internet,” he said. “I keep hearing people talk about ‘What is the next killer app?'” But Pitt, who has a lot of experience in software development and in the solar electric market, said there is no open control of the power grid, and the smart grid—unlike the Internet—does not want to be free. As Pitt puts it, “SDG&E [San Diego Gas & Electric] could care less about enabling new technologies that allow entrepreneurs to make money.”
Pitt’s skepticism may go against the current, especially since the Obama Administration awarded more than $3.4 billion in grants last fall to spur the development of smart grid technologies meant to trim utility bills, reduce blackouts, and promote renewable energy. Most, if not all, of that money went to utility-led projects.
But as the founding CEO of San Diego-based EcoDog, Pitt has put his money where his opinions are. As we reported last summer, EcoDog’s principal product is Fido, a home energy-monitoring device that
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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