As vice president of engineering for the energy management company EnerNOC, Hugh Scandrett is deep in the trenches of bringing energy management applications for the smart grid to a wide variety of companies — utilities as well as commercial, institutional, and industrial customers.
Scandrett joined the Boston-based company in 2011, and as head of engineering he leads the company’s software development, engineering, quality assurance, and R&D teams. EnerNOC supplies guaranteed electrical capacity to commercial end-users, utilities, and wholesale energy suppliers, and accompanies that capacity with energy intelligence software. It helps companies figure out how they buy energy, when they’re seeing the highest demand, and how to optimize their usage.
In a conversation with Sam Ransbotham, an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the MIT Sloan Management Review guest editor for the Data and Analytics Big Idea Initiative, Scandrett says that being able to predict energy usage is key to saving money, and explains why turning on the AC at 7:00 a.m. on a hot day can be more efficient than waiting until 8:00 a.m.