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As part of New York state’s Reforming the Energy Vision, Sealed is partnering with National Grid to test a proposal under which customers would pay zero up-front costs for residential energy efficiency measures.
In this podcast, Andy Frank, founder and president of Sealed, explains the idea, which has been available to commercial customers for some time, but has never been offered to residential customers.
By partnering with National Grid, Sealed hopes to make this vision a reality, Frank said.
“We’re partnering with National Grid to cover all the costs of projects, and have projects paid for in savings,” he explained. “Lots of different energy technologies will be installed at low or no costs, as opposed to people having to pay money up front, which often gets in the way of people moving forward with energy efficiency.”
He added, “What we found is that people prefer to pay out of savings, and National Grid will help us make that vision a reality.”
Under the state demonstration project, another company, Smarter Grid Solutions, will also show how technologies and new business models can provide benefits to utilities, third parties and customers.
“Through its Flexible Interconnect project, Smarter Grid Solutions’ Active Network Management (ANM) – a technology that increases the volume of energy being delivered by renewable and distributed energy resources through the existing grid – is being used, in coordination with Iberdrola USA, to integrate distributed energy resources (DER) and enable faster and cheaper connections,” said a press release from NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, which is participating in the demonstration project.
“The companies we are incubating…will be an important part of the new energy economy that is being built in the State of New York; we are delighted that two of our companies, Sealed and Smarter Grid Solutions, have been chosen for the REV demonstration projects,” said Pat Sapinsley, managing director of cleantech initiatives at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering in the press release. “For many decades now, innovation in the utility sector has been stunted by the monopolistic nature of our rate-based system.”
