Tag Archives: sdg&e

Monitoring System Helps Homeowner from Wasting Power – EcoDog

Posted on April 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

While working in the solar industry, Ron Pitt became frustrated by the obsessive focus on generating one more watt hour of energy. He saw the opportunity for a chunk of the market that everyone was ignoring — how to reduce energy usage.

That led him to found EcoDog — ecodoginc.com — to help homeowners save on electricity bills and reduce energy use without investing big sums of money or drastically changing their lives. FIDO is the home energy monitoring system he developed, bootstrapping the company in his garage.

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Seed money from former SDG&E CEO Tom Page helped Pitt, 49, recruit nine colleagues, move into a San Diego office and launch FIDO in 2010.

He has more than 100 customers but is talking to investors and plans to scale up production this summer.

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SDG&E makes it official: 20 percent of 2011 power was renewable

Posted on March 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

SDG&E officially alerted state regulators Thursday that it met a goal to buy 20 percent of its power from renewable sources, a year later than hoped for, a utility official said.

The state goal had been to meet the 20 percent goal by 2010, but no utility made it. In 2002, SDG&E bought 0.5 percent of its electricity from solar, wind or biomass, said Jim Avery, SDG&E’s senior vice president for power supply. Avery said construction of a high-capacity transmission line to Imperial County, called the Sunrise Powerlink, made a huge difference.

“There’s not a single fossil (fuel) generator that’s lined up to use Sunrise,” Avery said. “Once people saw there was certainty behind it, it has created a wealth of opportunities, so much so we have truly been able to pick and choose.”

The utility took a big leap this year by signing a contract to buy power from a wind generation plant in Riverside County owned by Shell and Goldman Sachs which provides 5 percent of its overall supply, a quarter of the electricity it needed to meet the renewable goal.

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