It’s been a busy year here at Sense! And, 2023 is shaping up to be an even bigger year for us. Since starting the company, we’ve been focused on how we can use technology and applications to help consumers better manage their homes – first from an energy perspective but over time we think we can have an even broader role by adding intelligence to all systems of a home and helping to make homes healthier and safer while saving money by saving energy.
Until recently, the sort of real-time consumer experience provided by Sense could only be achieved through additional hardware in the home. But, we’ve always felt that we need the core infrastructure in homes to become smart. For us, that means building Sense into the electrical panel or electric meter (the two places in the home that you can have a complete picture of how energy is being used). We’ve been working on this for the past few years with Schneider Electric for building Sense into electrical panels and with Landis+Gyr on next generation smart meters for utilities.
Schneider announced their new smart panels as part of their Home Energy Management Solution at CES in January. The Schneider Pulse smart panel, powered in part by embedded technology from Sense, can be combined with a suite of Schneider solutions to bring greater automation to energy production, storage, measurement and control. The complete solution will roll out over the course of 2023.
In 2020, we announced a partnership with Landis+Gyr to embed Sense technology in their Revelo meters and have been hard at work with the team at Landis since then. These meters will begin to roll out to consumers’ homes this year – there are announced deployments with National Grid in New York and Massachusetts and with Otter Tail Power in Minnesota and North Dakota. With just these announced rollouts, Sense will be available in over 3 million homes. We feel this will establish a new benchmark for how utilities can provide real benefits to customers based on smart meters – this is the first time that utilities will provide a real-time mobile application experience without the need for additional hardware in the home.
I just returned from DistribuTECH 2023 where we announced a partnership with Itron for Sense running on their distributed intelligence (DI) platform. There is now broad acceptance in the industry that next generation utility meters can be the platform for a range of applications – both consumer facing and grid facing. Since starting Sense we’ve known that we need to move from legacy, one-way communication (where meters collect data and send to the utilities) to something more like the architecture of Sense – using network-connected edge computing to support a range of real-time applications. It is great to be working with the two leading providers of meters and associated platforms.
We’ve been growing our team here at Sense – now over 140 people. Part of our growth is to support our scale as we expand into millions of homes. We are also significantly increasing the size of our product, engineering, and data science teams to expand how we deliver actionable insights to our customers. These teams are hard at work on the next generation of the Sense application experience to support a broader range of consumers. With so many homes and users, our focus on the consumer experience will only increase. For all of you who are Sense users, thank you for your ongoing engagement — your feedback continues to be a major input into what we do here at Sense.