The VegaWatt: Taking Over the On-Site Waste to Power Industry

The Vegawatt was invented by James Peret in Boylston Massachusetts. The system turns waste vegetable oil in restaurants into electricity and hot water. The value proposition is simple, they can lease a unit for $435 a month and save over $800 in electricity and fuel you need to buy. Or, you can buy it and get all your money back within 2 years. Simple. Profitable. Green.

The VegaWatt was a runner up in our Boston’s Top 10 Clean Tech Companies competition so I decided to interview the inventor, founder, and CEO James Peret as I organize profiling the winning companies (stay tuned for this, we’re going to be gathering some amazing video interviews and content of their offices and clean tech installations)

The interview is in five parts (so stayed tuned for the rest of the parts!) and the first part I wanted to share with you is where we talked about the Vegawatt’s customers, why they might not buy it, and why the system doesn’t really have any competition.

We talked about a relatively few number of items in this section but James goes into depth and provides great insights into the questions I asked and the competitive landscape in the waste-to-power industry. Listen to it here:

Vegawatt’s Perfect Customers and Industry Landscape

In this section we discussed:

-Why restaurants would NOT want to purchase a Vegawatt

-What their perfect customers look like

-What determines how big of a Vegawatt system a restaurant gets

-Why the Vegawatt has NO competition

-The reason that the system is never a primary heating source and is always supplementing a primary system