The average western consumer has no idea how much energy they use.
It’s not really their fault — the energy system was never designed to give the consumer visibility into their energy consumption. We even measure energy in many different and confusing ways. Gasoline is in gallons. Power is in kilowatt hours. Propane is in pounds. Natural gas is in joules or British Thermal Units.
Structurally, energy companies are not incentivized to provide their consumers with data about their energy use. You might get a bill from your power utility every other month, it has only a summary of usage, with little data about how exactly that energy was used. The bill also has all kinds of extra charges, taxes, tax on taxes, uplifts, access charges…
For the household, collecting the data to make sense of energy use is a huge exercise in building integrations from various data sources, if they’re even available. Households have many different energy suppliers (power and gas utilities, gasoline retailers), and there are many individual buyers.
Jotson is setting out to challenge that problem and fix it. To quote Mark Little, the CEO and co-founder, it’s baffling that mankind can put people into orbit around the planet, and land astronauts on the moon, but the average household can’t figure out how much they’re spending on energy.
By giving consumers real data about their energy use, Jotson hopes to empower people to take charge of their energy consumption and to make better personal choices to reduce their demands on the energy system.
In this interview, I speak with Mark about his start up, Jotson, and his mission to empower households to manage their energy cost and consumption.
Mark has more than 35 years of leadership experience in the energy industry, including 23 years at Imperial/Exxon, and most recently as President & CEO at Suncor Energy. During his career, Mark has led large complex organizations working on multi-billion-dollar energy projects, from the conceptual design, development, and project implementation through to operations and maintenance.
Mark has led the startup and operation of large wind, solar, and biogas projects, and is one of the founding CEOs of Pathways Alliance, an initiative that sets the six largest oil sands companies in Canada on a path to reach net-zero CO2 emissions.
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