The renter never picks the power company. Zack Schmitz built a startup to change that — clean electricity through the account you already have, for the same money you already pay.
There is a small box on your electricity bill that almost nobody reads. It says who actually generates your power. For tens of millions of apartment renters in deregulated states, that box is filled in by default, by inertia, by whoever the landlord's utility happens to be. Zack Schmitz noticed that the box was a door, and that nobody had bothered to open it.
Public Grid, the company he co-founded and runs, lets a renter switch to 100% renewable electricity in a single click — through their existing utility account, with no new hardware, no installer, and no premium on the bill. The pitch is almost suspiciously plain: same outlet, same payment, cleaner electrons, and usually a little money back. The hard part was never the idea. It was building the plumbing underneath it.
That plumbing is an energy analytics and brokerage platform. Public Grid plugs into smart-meter data — the fifteen-to-thirty-minute readings most renters never see — and uses bulk demand to broker clean power from wholesalers at rates that undercut the standard utility default. Aggregate enough apartments and you start buying energy like a large institution instead of like a single tenant who has no leverage at all.
Public Grid did not start as Public Grid. It began as Cottage Energy, aimed at the single-family home and the stubborn economics of residential natural gas. That version did not survive contact with reality. After meeting co-founder Joe Robbins — an environmental entrepreneur who once founded an energy-efficiency program at Clarkson University and did time at the Environmental Defense Fund — Schmitz turned the boat hard toward multifamily housing. Renters, not homeowners. The crowded middle of the market that flashier climate startups tend to skip.
It was a smart place to aim. Renters rarely get courted by clean-energy companies, because they don't own the roof and can't bolt panels onto someone else's building. Schmitz's move was to stop selling hardware and start selling access. The roof was never the point. The account was.
As a founder I don't always know if I'm doing things right, and I need to collaborate with people who can challenge me.
Before any of this, Schmitz spent roughly five years inside Deloitte, rising to a senior consultant focused on energy innovation, with earlier innovation work at Market Gravity. Consulting is a fine place to learn how large systems actually move and a frustrating place to watch your best ideas leave the room in someone else's slide deck. He left to go learn how to build instead of advise.
He landed at MIT and, characteristically, refused to pick a single lane. He pursued a master's that braided two threads at once: electrical engineering and computer science on one side, integrated design and management — human-centered design — on the other. His research zeroed in on home electrification and energy markets, which is to say he was researching his own company while founding it. The thesis and the startup were the same animal.
That double training shows up in the product. The engineering half explains why Public Grid can ingest meter data and broker wholesale energy. The design half explains why the consumer experience is one button instead of a forty-page enrollment packet. Most energy companies are run by people who love the grid and tolerate the customer. Schmitz seems to genuinely care which one is easier to use.
The quiet brilliance of Public Grid is that nobody at the table has to lose. Schmitz built it as a B2B real-estate play: partner with the building owners and property managers who control thousands of units at once, rather than knocking on doors one apartment at a time. The residents get cleaner power and a lower bill. The landlords earn a revenue-sharing fee for doing essentially nothing. The energy suppliers slash their customer-acquisition costs by reaching whole buildings instead of individuals. Everybody's interests point the same direction, which in energy is rare enough to be a feature.
Early on, that approach unlocked partnerships with large property owners and a pipeline of more than 350,000 housing units. The company went live in New York City in 2023 and set its sights on the roughly 20 million renters who live in deregulated U.S. energy markets — a serviceable market the team pegs north of a billion dollars, and one that grows every time another state opens its grid to competition.
Tell me what you need done and I'll do it — but they don't push back, they don't offer creative tension.
Public Grid is not a hundred-person machine. It is a small, deliberately distributed crew, with engineering spread across Boston, Argentina, and the Philippines. Building across that many time zones is a logistical headache, and Schmitz has been candid that managing it took outside help to untangle. What he won't compromise on is the kind of person he wants in the room. He has openly described his allergy to the "order-taker" engineer — the one who nods, takes the ticket, and never argues. He wants creative tension. He wants to be told he's wrong while there's still time to be wrong cheaply.
It's a telling preference for a founder. Plenty of CEOs say they want pushback and quietly punish it. Schmitz built hiring around it, growing the company's development capacity roughly threefold while raising money on the strength of a team that argues productively. A Greentown Labs alum, Public Grid is backed by Redbud VC and Hamilton Ventures, both of whom wrote checks during 2023 while the company was still proving the model.
The wager underneath all of it is that clean energy wins not when it's heroic but when it's boring — when switching is so frictionless that choosing renewable power feels like changing a setting rather than changing your life. Solar panels are a statement. A subscription you forget you have is an infrastructure. Schmitz is betting on the second one. Plug in, switch over, move apartments, and the plan follows you across the state line like a loyal utility that finally works for the tenant instead of around them.
He is not promising to save the planet with a gadget. He's removing the reason a renter would ever say no. That's a less cinematic ambition than most climate pitches, and probably a more durable one.
No panels. No installer. No new bill. Just a smarter buyer standing between the renter and the grid.
Public Grid links to the renter's existing utility account and reads smart-meter data in 15–30 minute intervals.
Thousands of units pooled into bulk demand — buying power like an institution, not a lone tenant.
Clean energy brokered from wholesalers at a discount. One click, and the renter is on 100% renewable.
Public Grid aimed at the part of the market most clean-energy startups ignore: the renter who can't touch the roof. Here's roughly what that opportunity looks like.
Bars scaled for illustration. Figures per Public Grid and its investors, 2023.
Swarm took out some of the complexity in building a team across timezones.
It had another name. Public Grid started life as Cottage Energy, chasing single-family gas before the hard pivot to renters.
Two brains, one degree. At MIT he ran hard engineering and human-centered design at the same time, refusing to choose.
He hires for arguments. Schmitz openly avoids "order-taker" engineers. He wants creative tension in the room.
Borderless build. A small team stretched across Boston, Argentina, and the Philippines ships the product.
Free, by design. Renters pay nothing to use it and can flip to renewable power in a single click.