The Sacramento Inno Awards recognize some of the year's most talented and successful players in the tech and startup community. This year, the Business Journal recognized companies, products, and leaders in the innovation space. Vistar Energy's XeroHome is one of this year's Innovations of the Year.
Vistar Energy's XeroHome is leveraging public data and on a cloud platform to help homeowners choose the most effective things they can do to upgrade their homes to be energy efficient — and then find incentives to help pay for them.
And Xerohome does this without ever going into the home.
XeroHome can make a custom recommendation for each individual home using publicly available data sets, machine learning and homeowner input.
For one home, the most cost-effective upgrade may be a new water heater, for a similar home right next door, that most cost-effective upgrade might be better windows.
XeroHome was piloted by the city of Sacramento and supported by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. It has since expanded the pilot to 10 cities with a variety of different utilities in multiple states.
Rocklin-based Vistar Energy launched in 2019 with the help of a Small Business Innovation Grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Before he was Vistar XeroHome's CEO and founder, Mudit Saxena worked 14 years as a researcher on energy efficiency in buildings.
The company was built to address the unmet yet crucial need to decarbonize the residential sector, which is a huge contributor to carbon emissions and a large user of energy.
But housing is fragmented. It has a distributed ownership base, and it is complex to create custom energy audits at scale for individual homes. By using public data sets, utility records and homeowner input on a web-based interface, XeroHome can perform a detailed energy audit on the home remotely.
That audit, in turn, makes it easier for homeowners to understand the financial and environmental benefits of different energy upgrades, and it can point them to the appropriate local, state and federal rebates and tax credits.
The customer can be the homeowner, a local jurisdiction, a utility or all three.
