On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger talked with Joe Piccirilli, CEO of RoseWater Energy, which creates innovative and intelligent energy management systems for governments, utilities, industries, and residential consumers. Focused on the mission to develop the next generation of renewable smart grid systems leveraging the best battery storage technologies, RoseWater works with their clients to design, build, integrate and manage power system assets specific to their needs.

Piccirilli spent nearly 50 years in the consumer electronics world. Through his travels in the industry, he noticed how much automation they were putting into people’s homes. Some of this automation includes the shades, the lights, and the doors. With this much automation being put into homes, they load up these homes with microprocessors. “In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was finding there were so many people who were incredibly dissatisfied with this product because it didn’t work,” Piccirilli said. “It always had to be rebooted. It was glitchy.” When he examined the product, he realized the product wasn’t wrong, and the installation was sound. So he wondered why these weren’t working, so he started to examine the problem. It turned out that power issues caused all the annoyances. Electric sags, surges, and micro outages from the grid were causing problems for the products.

This led him to examine the electrical grid. Here he found out that a generator can predict the electrical load, which means it will sag and surge. Before automation, nobody noticed these ups and downs. “The worst thing that happened, if you can remember the days of VCRs, is the little clock blinked on and off,” Piccirilli said. “Now, those sags and surges can prevent your air conditioning from running. They can prevent you from turning on your lights.”

In 2012, he started working on a product that would provide perfect power at the residential level. Listen to hear more about Piccirilli’s and RoseWater’s power solution.