Host: Cody Simms
Guest: Mike Phillips | Co-Founder & CEO | Sense
Category: ⚡ Energy | In-Home Intelligence
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[7:37] “Buildings in general are […] about 40% of all energy use worldwide. Homes are a bit more than half of that, but growing because of increased air conditioner demand. The fundamental challenge […] [is] how do we make home smart in a deep way. […] The core systems of your home, so the pipes, and the wires […] are kind of dumb systems today and they don't need to be. We can make these things smart.”
[11:37] “As much as we will, over time, be automating more and more things in the home, there's just no getting around the fact that […] people living in the home […] have a big impact on homes work, and therefore big impact on how efficient they are. […] This energy world is becoming less important about how much energy we use and it's becoming increasingly important about when you use it. […] So we came at this from a notion of, we have to engage the consumers.”
[12:40] “To engage consumers, you've got to make it a real time experiment. People tried to do things from existing meter data. […] But the current infrastructure that gives you 15 minute interval data a day later, it’s just not good enough. People don't care what happened yesterday. […] And the other insight we have is you got to make it broader than just energy. So even though we came at this from an energy perspective, […] we have to take this broader view of making homes intelligent for not just energy.”
[14:33] “The broad thing that we're going after is making the systems of your home, […] smart. […] So we have this little orange box […] [that] goes inside the electrical panel, […] [which] is basically being its own meter. […] We're measuring power at a million times a second. So crazy high resolution power meters. […] And from that we can with machine learning, we can figure out that the microwave just turned on, the toaster just turned off, or your air conditioner is trying to start but is failing. […] It's provided in a […] fun, bubbly application that gives people this real time view of their home. […] Active users get 15% [energy] savings.”
[20:02] “We have a footprint in the home where we can talk to other devices. So we have integrations with some smart plugs […]. We're starting to do integrations into EV chargers. We do things like hot water heaters and thermostats. You can see how this engaging app then becomes a central point for how you might better engage with variable rate plans […], because of our overall big picture is we want to support the energy transition. So that means more renewables on the grid, more electrification.”
[24:08] “We are staying consumer facing from an application [standpoint]. […] Think of us as Google Maps or Waze on your iPhone. […] We think this future of this energy world is going to support and should enable applications like Sense to be a consumer facing application with benefits to the utility for sure and most especially with benefits to the consumer and then the policy.”
[30:25] “We studied what would happen for carbon reduction if you let us automate when your car gets charged. And if you're in California it was the biggest change. We could save 43% of the carbon emissions of car charging by letting us automate it.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google (Original Title: "Startup Series: Sense")
🕰️ 44 min | 🗓️ 06/23/2022
✅ Time saved: 42 min
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