When it comes to supplying electricity to large enterprises with multi-building campuses, the allocation system is archaic. Unlike homeowners, who pay for what they actually use, campuses buy a standard monthly capacity. This capacity must, by common-sense necessity, be based on max usage needs. This is true even if the company only consumes such max usage rarely, like a single busy season.
That was a situation that bothered the hell out of COI Energy founder and CEO, SaLisa Berrien. After earning her degree in mechanical engineering (and later an MBA), she spent 25 years as an energy engineer at major utility companies like PECO, ConEdison, and Exelon, as well as at a few clean energy startups.
Berrien chose this field because, as a child, there were times that her parents couldn’t pay their electric bill. “We were in the dark a lot. And as a kid, my self-esteem was low,” she told TechCrunch. Other kids who knew her situation teased her.
So when she got her degree and took a job with an electric company, “All my friends were like, ‘You’re crazy. That is a stagnated field. It’s a white, male-dominated, older-men field. Why are you doing this?’ And for me, it was personal, because I knew what it felt like being a kid,” she said. Berrien wanted to make electricity more efficient, more affordable, more available so no child ever went without.
She worked on customer operations, smart grids, clean energy programs.
“As an engineer, I would go in and make recommendations on how they could improve the energy performance of their buildings, how they can eliminate bottlenecks on production lines,” Berrien said.
She learned how to use big data to optimize energy efficiency. But no one was addressing the basic problem: Companies were reserving, and paying for, far more energy than they used.
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