EnerNOC (Nasdaq ENOC) came to Cambridge Innovation Center in the midst of a fund raising tour of more than 30 venture funds and angel groups in the fall of 2002. The two founders, Tim Healy and David Brewster, were looking for a few million dollars to take advantage of a deregulated New England electricity market. EnerNOC’s idea was to remotely connect to back-up generators, usually found sitting idle on building roofs, and dispatch them in aggregate during times of peak demand. A virtual peak power plant with none of the capital invested, no transmission lines and their incumbent social and environmental impact, no distribution costs. Just a bit of instrumentation, and shared profits with the building owner. Load curtailment (turning down or shutting down elevators, chillers, etc) would work as well. A few companies were doing something similar here and there using phone calls or radios, but David and Tim were the first to see this could be a scalable business – that expanding electricity production capacity for peak times could be avoided altogether in many cases by making the electric grid smarter.