I’ve had a couple more meetings with Nate over the past couple weeks. We’ve talked about a lot of different aspects of the business opportunity, mostly during meetings in Oakland. We have pretty much decided to work together on this venture. We still don’t have a company name, but the team name for the CCTO is Euclid Street Technologies. This name has to do with the fact that his office at Berkeley is on Euclid Avenue (I guess Street sounded better). In any case, I have joined his CCTO team. We’re still looking for a marketing/business persion to fill out our founding team.

The basic premise for the company is summed up in our objective from the executive summary:

“Euclid Street Technologies (EST) offers a controls solution to the homeowner who wants better climate comfort from their central HVAC system and a lower monthly utility bill. The Distributed Thermostat is a thermal control solution that reduces room-to-room variations, temperature swings, and your utility bill. Unlike a programmable thermostat, our product understands the behavior of every room in your home.”

Today was the first of the Innovator Symposium Series presented by the CCTO. The symposium series is intended to touch on each of the six market area addressed by the competition categories: Air, Water & Waste; Energy Efficiency; Green Building; Renewables; Smart Power; and Transportation. Today’s symposium was on Smart Power and was hosted by AMD, the category sponsor. The even was set up as a panel discussion. After a brief presentation about the competition by Mike Santullo of the CCTO, they jumped into the panel. The moderator was Dallas Kachan from Inside Greentech. The panelists included:

• Dallas Kachan - Inside Greentech (moderator)
• Ellen Petrill - EPRI
• Stewart Ramsay - Consultant and former VP at PG&E
• Scott McGaraghan - EnerNOC
• Steve Vassallo - Foundation Capital

Each panelist gave a brief introduction to what they do, then there was a moderated discussion followed by Q&A from the audience. It was interesting to see that EnerNOC had gone public less than a month or two ago. They focus on an area known as Demand Response which is basically providing a way for the utility companies to reduct the load on the grid. EnerNOC does this by aggregating a bunch of corporations willing to reduce power when called upon, and selling this service to the utility. There are some possibilities for us to provide this functionality to our customers as well, though it is challenging to aggregate enough home users to make it viable. Most of this symposium focused on technology for improving the grid, though the CCTO Smart Power category has a more broad definition.