UC Davis's Energy Efficiency Center Makes Conservation Sexy

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Photograph by Jamie Kripke

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The United States generates more energy than any other country in the world -- and wastes more than half of it. Efficiency, it turns out, can be a rich resource. In an unassuming strip mall off I-80 in California's Central Valley, those riches are being exploited by a kind of alchemy that combines science with business. Efficient technologies, from sensor-equipped LED lighting to smart electric meters, are flowing at a brisk pace out of labs, attracting capital from Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley VCs, and support from the likes of Wal-Mart, Chevron, Samsung, and California's major utilities. "In the course of an afternoon, quite literally in this room," says Andrew Hargadon, a business professor at the University of California at Davis, "we've been able to introduce entrepreneurs and their VCs to three different utilities and immediately begin talking about pilot programs." This is UC Davis's Energy Efficiency Center, or EEC, a new nexus for innovation.

"Efficiency," says Ralph Cavanagh, energy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of the EEC, "is the unsexy resource." When the EEC was established in 2006, with Hargadon as founding director and a $1 million challenge grant funded from the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric, it was the only such university center in the world, compared to the more than 30 for nuclear power.

But Hargadon, a handsome 45-year-old, is determined to make efficiency if not exactly sexy, then at least marketable. Technology-transfer offices at most universities seem to assume that the institution's role ends when the ink on a new patent is dry. The center works differently, as an ongoing, multidirectional exchange of ideas. "A lot of the original mission and values were based on the notion that what was missing in the puzzle was actually the networks that connected researchers with investors, big companies, utilities, and the public sector," says Hargadon. "So what we could do to have the biggest impact was to foster these network relationships."

Here, Hargadon is speaking from experience. After interning at Ideo, he went to Apple, where he was an early product designer. A nationally recognized expert on innovation, he wrote How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate for the Harvard Business School Press, and his consultancy, Hargadon Group, has advised companies including Mattel and Mars on developing new business models. His academic research is on the turn-of-the-century development of the electric industry, and with that, too, he focuses on the relationships forged by early innovators. "You can look back from James Watt, Thomas Edison, all the way up to today -- the reason we remember those inventors is because they built better networks," Hargadon says.

The Davis network includes such students as Siva Gunda, an EEC fellow and a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering. While writing his dissertation on fuel cells and interning at PG&E, he has worked with business students at Davis's Center for Entrepreneurship on two different startups: CEDR is a low-cost demand-response system for electric grids; WicKool is a retrofit device that improves the performance of rooftop air conditioners up to 5% by recycling condensation. Wic-Kool is considered one of the standout ideas developed at Davis so far; within five months of the first napkin sketch, Wal-Mart was trying it out atop a Sacramento store. "As a PhD, the focus is in the lab. You don't really think about where your research is going as long as you can publish something," says Gunda. "But I think the beauty of the center is that it gives the engineers an opportunity to think, Are you working on something that's useful?"

Venture capitalists investing in green tech are essential links in the network. "The most vulnerable element in this kind of academic research is the team that gets built around it as it gets moved out of the lab, and the first early-stage investors that put their time into it," says Hargadon. Raju Pandey, a computer-science professor at Davis, developed wireless monitoring technology that can save tech companies 20% in energy costs by better targeting air conditioning and fans at server racks rather than just blast-chilling an entire data center. Hargadon introduced Pandey to Barbara Grant, managing director of American River Ventures, a Sacramento VC firm focused on efficiency, which agreed to invest; Pandey founded SynapSense in just a few weeks and has attracted $20 million in venture capital to date from Grant and others. "Andy [Hargadon] is absolutely the linchpin of why this works," Grant says. "It's not only vital and vibrant, it's almost viral."