Seventy investors, founders, researchers, and grid professionals filled the room at Baker Tilly in Rancho Cordova on June 18 for CleanStart’s latest Cleantech Meetup, “Intelligence on the Grid: How Much Smarter Does it Need to be?” Fueled by a great spread from our hosts at Baker Tilly, the conversation made one thing clear: the strain on California’s grid is also one of the biggest business opportunities in the state right now, and Greater Sacramento is positioning itself to lead it.

Andy Wunder of E2 opened the evening, and he did not come empty handed. He invited the room to join E2’s Capitol walks, where advocates bring the organization’s progress report directly to lawmakers. I will say it plainly: I love walking the Capitol with that progress report in hand. It is one of the most direct ways to turn a great room of people into real movement on the policy that affects this industry.

Mayor Garrett Gatewood followed, laying out exactly why this region is the place to do that work. He spoke about how the City of Rancho Cordova is actively working to connect investors with entrepreneurs and how the city is building partnerships that support founders as they grow here. It is a reminder that economic development in this region is not abstract policy talk. It is investors in the room meeting the startups they will fund, and a city government that sees grid innovation as an engine for local growth.

With the room set, the panel discussion and audience Q&A began. Indu Nambiar of CAISO, Davis Siap, and Denver Hinds of SMUD took the stage together. The first question came from Kula Addy, founder of IAWFlexhub, who asked how researchers can support the future grid. From there, the panel dug into grid edge technology: how to deploy it safely and securely, how fast the industry can reasonably move, and what is lost if it moves too fast without the right safeguards. All three panelists were genuinely optimistic about AI’s role in the grid, particularly its potential to unlock flexibility on both sides of the meter.

Davis pushed the conversation further, pointing out that one of the biggest obstacles is not the technology itself but getting utilities on board. His work reframes the value of demand response and grid edge resources, essentially flipping the traditional cost conversation on its head so utilities can see the upside rather than just the risk. The panel agreed that what the grid needs now is not just more technology, but technology deployed thoughtfully and with intention.

Denver highlighted that SMUD has been running several pilots, around grid flexibility they are looking to smartly expand.  SMUD already has run pilots and programs for residential and commercial load management. Like My Energy Optimizer and Optimizer+ for qualifying rate payers. They are also looking to learn from pilots like Peak and Power Direct. 

Audience curiosity quickly turned to vehicle-to-grid technology and when businesses might actually be able to adopt it. Denver offered a grounded, practical answer: SMUD has solutions available today, but the utility has to build the plans and policies that protect every ratepayer before it can move forward. It was a useful reminder that grid modernization is as much about trust and process as it is about innovation.

When asked about the single biggest opportunity created by this moment, Indu pointed to building a smarter grid, while Denver highlighted demand response programs as the near-term unlock. On whether AI helps or hurts the grid, the consensus was candid: in the short term, AI will add real strain through growing demand. But as Indu put it, that pressure is exactly why the grid needs to adopt AI tools in a meaningful way now, since the faster the industry moves toward a smarter grid, the better positioned it will be.

The “magic wand” question produced some of the night’s best moments. Davis said if we have a magic wand, we should be wishing for cold fusion. Indu and Denver both pointed to something more immediately actionable: getting smart grid edge devices into consumers’ hands and getting demand response fully utilized by utilities. For the investors and founders in the room, that is a direct signal about where the next wave of opportunity is sitting.

So what should businesses, investors, and civic leaders actually do in the next 90 days? Davis’s advice was direct: do more than another pilot. Indu’s was to get engaged with the AI ecosystem forming around the grid right now. And I closed the panel with mine: get engaged with Rancho Cordova, and walk the Capitol with E2.

None of this happens without the organizations that make CleanStart’s work possible. Huge thanks to E2, SMUD, the City of Rancho Cordova, and the Carlsen Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Sacramento State for supporting this event and the broader mission of growing cleantech in this region.

If you build, fund, or research the future grid, we want you at the table. Connect with CleanStart, with the City of Rancho Cordova‘s economic development team, and with E2 to find your next opportunity to get involved. And don’t wait until then to stay engaged: CleanStart hosts virtual discussions throughout the year, and our next in-person Cleantech Meetup lands this September. 

Charlie Bucket got a candy factory. The winners of this year’s UC Davis Big Bang Business Competition got something arguably sweeter: validation, prize money, and a launching pad for startups that are changing the world.

The annual Big Bang competition, hosted by Joe DiNunzio, Executive Director of the Mike & Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, went full Willy Wonka this year — and it worked. The theme wasn’t just a costume choice. Like Roald Dahl’s factory full of impossible inventions, Big Bang is exactly the kind of place where ideas that sound too good to be true turn out to be real, and the people behind them turn out to be the ones you should have been watching all along.

CleanStart was in the room, and we left energized.

The Golden Ticket: First Bite Takes the Top Prize

Before we get to our favorite sector win, credit where it’s due: First Bite claimed the top prize of $25,000, sponsored by DLA Piper. Their device — a clever hybrid of pacifier and breathing tube securement system designed for intubated infants in the ICU — is the kind of elegant, empathetic engineering that reminds you why startups matter. A breathing tube is a lifeline. First Bite makes sure it stays in place, while also reducing infant discomfort and supporting the development of the natural sucking reflex. Simple idea, serious impact.

Our Pick of the Night: Data Pigeon Wins the Energy + Sustainability Award

The Energy + Sustainability Sector Award — sponsored by Blue Tech Valley and SMUD — went to Data Pigeon, and from a CleanStart perspective, this one hits close to home.

Here’s the problem Data Pigeon is solving: public EV charging is quietly failing, and most people don’t know it. One in five charging sessions fails today. Stations break down silently. Operators find out too late — often only after a frustrated driver reports the problem. By then, a technician dispatch is already on the books at more than $1,000 a visit. Multiply that across a national network trying to scale at the speed that the clean energy transition demands, and you have a serious infrastructure reliability crisis hiding in plain sight.

Data Pigeon built AI-powered monitoring and diagnostics software that changes the equation. Their platform continuously analyzes charger data, detects early signs of failure, and pinpoints root causes in real time — before drivers ever see an “out of service” screen. Instead of reactive maintenance, operators get proactive intelligence. Instead of guessing, they get actionable insights.

This matters enormously. The EV charging buildout is one of the central pillars of our clean transportation future, and its credibility depends on reliability. Every failed charging session is a setback — not just for the driver, but for public trust in the whole transition. Data Pigeon is building the nervous system that keeps that infrastructure honest.

The Energy award is sponsored by two institutions — Blue Tech Valley and SMUD — that understand this deeply. SMUD has been a leader in accelerating clean transportation in our region, and their backing of this award signals exactly the kind of partnership between utilities, investors, and entrepreneurs that CleanStart exists to catalyze.

Watch Data Pigeon. This is the kind of company that doesn’t just win competitions — it fixes a real problem at real scale.

The Rest of the Wonka Factory: Sector Award Winners

Every sector winner this year was worth paying attention to. A quick look at the full board:

🌾 Food + Agriculture: Proof Pudding A functional chocolate pudding formulated for brain health and memory, built on a “Food is Medicine” philosophy. They’re targeting the global dementia burden with bioactive ingredients — and doing it in a form factor people will actually eat. Smart nutrition meets approachable snacking.

🏥 Human Health: Stork Labs Medical Stork Labs is attacking the U.S. maternity care crisis with a flexible, semi-autonomous obstetric device designed to reduce emergency C-sections. Their approach uses embedded sensors and flexible materials to guide safer operative vaginal deliveries. Clinically significant, technically elegant.

🐾 Animal Health: Pharmstead Pharmstead is rethinking how vaccines reach animals on farms — replacing labor-intensive injections with microscopic carriers that deliver vaccines through spray or drinking water. The target: Salmonella, before it ever reaches the food supply. Safer food, fewer antibiotics, less farm labor. This is how you prevent contamination at the source.

🤝 Social Entrepreneurship: Ground Truth Genomics Genomic verification for clonally propagated crops — the crops like grapes, almonds, and strawberries that drive billions in California agriculture. Ground Truth Genomics issues Clonal Integrity Certificates that give nurseries, growers, and breeders certainty about what they’re planting. When identity errors go undetected, entire harvests can be compromised. Ground Truth makes sure that doesn’t happen.

📚 EdTech: CuraVoice An AI-powered clinical communication platform that lets healthcare students practice realistic patient interactions through voice simulation. Instead of memorizing for boards, students build actual clinical reasoning and communication confidence before they set foot in a real exam room — or a real patient room.

Why This Matters to CleanStart

Big Bang is a proving ground for the Central Valley’s innovation ecosystem. It draws students and early-stage founders from across UC Davis and beyond, pushes them through a rigorous competition structure, and puts them in front of investors, mentors, and sponsors who can actually move the needle.

For CleanStart, events like Big Bang are where pipelines get built. The clean energy and clean tech ecosystem in the Sacramento region doesn’t happen by accident — it happens because institutions like the Child Institute create stages, and founders like the Data Pigeon team step onto them and show the world what they’ve built.

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners. The golden tickets are yours. Now go build the factory.

CleanStart accelerates clean technology entrepreneurs in California’s Central Valley. Learn more at CleanStart.org.

The other week I had the privilege of moderating the “Bridging Silicon Valley Innovation to Central Valley Scale” panel at the inaugural Capital Valleys Forum, a flagship event of Sacramento Climate Week 2026 held at UC Davis’s Aggie Square campus.

I’ve been in rooms where founders pitch technology that could reshape how we farm, move water, and power rural communities. I’ve also been in rooms where growers and water managers explain exactly why that technology never made it past the demo. What made the Capital Valleys Forum different is that those people were finally in the same room — and the conversation was structured to actually go somewhere.

The Translation Problem Is Real

The panel I moderated focused on a challenge I see every day at CleanStart: the gap between a promising clean technology pilot and a deployment template that Central Valley agricultural operators can realistically adopt. It’s not that the innovation doesn’t exist. It’s that the path from a funded demo to a repeatable, bankable project is full of friction — procurement complexity, permitting delays, workforce gaps, and a chronic lack of intermediaries who speak both languages.

That’s the work CleanStart does. We sit at that translation layer, connecting clean energy entrepreneurs with the mentorship, market access, and regional networks they need to move from concept to scale. So moderating this panel felt like a natural extension of conversations we’ve been having for years — just with more of the right people at the table.

What Stood Out

The Forum was capped at 80 participants, and you could feel it. This wasn’t a conference where you sit in the back and check email. Six working panels ran through the day, covering everything from pricing under instability and resilience-linked valuation to workforce pipelines and de-risked capital structures. Every session was built to produce something concrete — investable signals, partnership commitments, execution playbooks.

A few things stuck with me from our panel specifically. First, the appetite from Central Valley operators for structured technology adoption pathways is far greater than most Silicon Valley founders realize. Second, Sacramento’s position as the policy capital gives us a unique advantage in packaging climate solutions for export — not just within California, but nationally. And third, the role of regional intermediaries and accelerators in de-risking deployment for both sides of the equation came up repeatedly. That’s validating for the work we do at CleanStart, and it sharpened my thinking about where we can push harder.

Looking Ahead

The Capital Valleys Forum was organized by Cool Climate Collective, they built something genuinely useful on the first try. Aggie Square was the right venue — two miles from the Capitol, designed for exactly this kind of applied, cross-sector work.

I’m already looking forward to next year. The connections made on May 8 are already turning into follow-up conversations, and I expect several of them to produce real partnerships in the months ahead. If the first Forum proved the concept, the second one should raise the stakes — deeper into specific commodity sectors, more Central Valley operators at the table, and clearer metrics for what deployment at scale actually looks like in this region.

If you’re a climate tech founder, investor, grower, or policymaker working at the intersection of innovation and Central Valley agriculture, keep Sacramento Climate Week on your calendar. And if you want to get involved with CleanStart’s work in the meantime, reach out. We’ve got plenty to do between now and next May.

Thomas Hall is Executive Director of CleanStart, a clean technology nonprofit accelerator based in California’s Central Valley.

If you’re building a company around battery storage in California, you already know the technology works. The harder question — the one that keeps founders up at night — is how to turn that technology into a sustainable business. At CleanStart’s most recent Perspectives webinar, we tackled exactly that question, sitting down with Seth Hilton, a partner at Stoel Rives and one of the leading energy regulatory attorneys in the country, to cut through the complexity.

What followed was one of the most candid conversations we’ve hosted about the real mechanics of the California energy storage market — from CPUC procurement mandates to behind-the-meter revenue stacking to the hard truths about timelines. Here’s what every battery storage founder needs to know.

Start Where the Money Is: Utility-Scale Procurement

For founders targeting the front-of-meter, utility-scale market, Seth’s guidance was direct: the revenue foundation is capacity, not energy. California’s investor-owned utilities, community choice aggregators (CCAs), and energy service providers are all subject to Resource Adequacy (RA) obligations set by the CPUC — and those obligations require long-term contracts that create predictable, bankable revenue streams for storage projects.

“For utility scale, it’s really figuring out how you can obtain a long-term contract through those utility solicitations. That’s going to be the key. And then stacking the additional revenue associated with energy, ancillary services, and other opportunities — but really, it’s the capacity that’s procured pursuant to these programs that are key.”

— Seth Hilton, Partner, Stoel Rives LLP

The CPUC recently ordered procurement of 6 gigawatts of new storage capacity — a significant mandate that creates real contracting opportunities for companies ready to compete in utility solicitations. Standard RA qualification requires a 4-hour duration minimum, but the Commission’s most recent order took a meaningful step forward by requiring that up to 25% of procured resources be long-duration storage of 8 hours or more.

The Regulatory Reality for Long-Duration Storage

If your technology plays in the long-duration space — anything above 4 hours — there’s both good news and honest complexity to understand. The CPUC has explicitly recognized the need for longer-duration resources, but the valuation frameworks to properly compensate them are still catching up. Seth noted that companies engaging early in the regulatory process, rather than waiting for the rules to be finished, will be best positioned to shape the outcome.

Behind the Meter: Revenue Stacking Is the Strategy

For companies pursuing residential or commercial behind-the-meter deployments — distributed battery networks, virtual power plants, or consumer-owned systems aggregated for grid services — the business model is more complex but the opportunity is growing. Seth’s advice: don’t look for a single revenue stream. Build a stack.

“A lot of the kind of legal and regulatory issues we work with them on are figuring out what incentive programs can be used to reduce the cost of behind-the-meter resources — the Self-Generation Incentive Program, the BUILD program at the Energy Commission — working through those opportunities to reduce costs, and then the reliability aspects: backup power generation is a key aspect for these behind-the-meter resources.”

— Seth Hilton, Partner, Stoel Rives LLP

The conversation got especially concrete when Greg Connolly of Kora Power described a real-world deployment scenario: working with a utility on a 100,000+ battery residential deployment targeting 1.6 gigawatts of distributed storage. His insight — backed by the math — was that distributing batteries within existing residential circuits can actually be cheaper than utility-scale deployment once you factor in the infrastructure upgrades required. Each substation upgrade runs roughly $6 million; each transformer upgrade, around $500,000. At scale, the economics of distributed storage look very different.

The VPP and Demand Response Landscape

Virtual power plants and demand response programs sit at the intersection of behind-the-meter deployment and grid services — and it’s a space evolving quickly, if unevenly. Seth was candid about the pattern he’s seen repeatedly: the CPUC creates a program to incentivize storage or VPP participation, the structure doesn’t quite match market reality, and participation is low. Programs have come and gone at SDG&E and face uncertainty at PG&E.

That’s not a reason to avoid this space. It’s a reason to engage proactively — building the business case, working within existing demand response frameworks, and pursuing targeted tweaks rather than waiting for a new program to be built from scratch.

The Honest Answer on Timelines

Thomas asked Seth the question every investor-backed founder is wrestling with: what are realistic timelines for getting contracts and revenue in the door? The answer was refreshingly direct.

“It’s gonna take way longer than you think, usually. If you’re talking about development in the utility space, front of the meter, where you need to interconnect that resource — interconnection is a real challenge. Takes years to work through that process. If you’re creating a new program, that can take a year, probably more like a year, or it can take many years of working with the PUC.”

— Seth Hilton, Partner, Stoel Rives LLP

Behind-the-meter deployments within existing programs move faster — but creating new programs or regulatory pathways adds years, not months. For founders, this has a direct implication: your regulatory strategy needs to be part of your fundraising story, and your investors need to understand the difference between a hard tech company operating in a regulated market and a software company with a 12-month go-to-market.

The Bigger Picture: California Is Moving, Even if Slowly

It would be easy to walk away from a regulatory deep-dive like this feeling daunted. Seth’s closing perspective was a useful corrective. California has gone from procuring its first 50 megawatts of storage capacity years ago to operating over 13 gigawatts on the CAISO system today. The state is planning for significantly more — and the data center boom, itself driving a significant share of that 6 gigawatt order in PG&E territory, is creating new adjacent opportunities for storage to displace gas backup generation.

“It may not be optimal, but there are a lot of opportunities for utility-scale storage, and for behind-the-meter storage. Some of it is working through the various programs that may apply to your resource, figuring out how you stack the various revenue streams that are available to you, and create something that will actually work. I really do think there’s some significant opportunities here going forward for energy storage under the current structures.”

— Seth Hilton, Partner, Stoel Rives LLP

Regulatory lag is real. So is the opportunity. The companies that will win are those that understand the system well enough to work within it — and to push it forward strategically rather than waiting for a perfect framework that may never arrive.

As Thomas wrapped the session: “Let’s build things towards this 6 gigawatts of power that we need.”