This week, we made a pivot to our idea and introduced a residential component of EcoSense.  This was done in hopes to address Professor Darwin’s concerns that our group’s solution did not go into enough depth in regards to energy.  EcoSense Citizen is meant to cultivate the social change necessary to truly move forward in clean and renewable energy.  EcoSense Citizen provides citizens with the real-time energy mix of the grid in order to give them the tools necessary to make eco-conscious decisions.  While we think this idea has huge potential in cultivating the change Vizag needs, there are certain factors of the business model that need to be worked out before our final presentation.

 

In order to address these necessary changes, we’ve carved out time to meet with several pertinent contacts, both on the technical and non-technical sides.  Natalie met with the CEO of WattTime, a startup optimizing EV charging stations to use the cleanest energy on the grid, this week to get her feedback on our idea as her startup utilizes the same data we would need.  She shared that WattTime initially begun as a text-based service notifying people of the energy mix and ran into issues with changing behavior.  However, her pilot program was small and took place in the Bay Area where the plethora of information already available inevitably diluted the effects of the service. We are further looking into research on technology cultivating behavioral change.  Further, Chaitanya and Trevor spoke to Rajeev at Airosense to get details on the hardware behind their sensors, their locations, and the cost structure.  The conversation was very productive, and we were assured that the partnership will be worth our while.  This upcoming week, Natalie will be meeting with Khalid Kadir, an expert in developing economies here at the Blum Center, on how to effectively propose our ideas.  Additionally, we will be meeting with Param to work through and fine tune our model.  Finally, we have a phone conversation with Yatish Rajawat tonight.

 

The Energy and Pollution group is going to great lengths to make sure our idea is holistic and effective.  We feel we are close and look forward to hashing out the details with the various industry leaders we’ve been working with.

 

The Energy and Pollution Group
Chaitanya Mittal, Trevor Dowds, Natalie Chyba, Wendy Ho, Mischa Fritz, Amy Nguyen