Founder, Mycrogrid®
Palm Desert, California.
Author of Cut the Cord. Building desert energy since 2006.
The founder
Vincent Battaglia.
He has been designing residential energy systems in the Coachella Valley since 2006. The conviction behind them — that a home should produce, store, and control its own power, with the utility as backup — started two decades earlier and eight thousand miles away.
Where it started
He learned what a centralized grid costs by living on one.
Vincent spent the better part of the 1990s in Moscow and across the former Soviet territories, running a company that worked in real estate development, importing, and television and film production. What he took away had nothing to do with any of that.
A grid run for the grid
Post-communist Russia ran electricity the way a bureaucracy runs anything — centrally, wastefully, and with the customer last in line. That is where his distaste for centralized power systems was formed, years before he had any professional reason to care.
Riga, 1997
On an apartment building in Latvia he saw rooftop solar and solar thermal doing real work for the people living underneath it. Power made where it was used, controlled by the building itself. He has been chasing that arrangement ever since.
Home in 1999
He returned to the United States, earned his California real estate broker's license, and spent the next several years introducing sustainable building practices to retail developers — learning how buildings actually get built before trying to change what powers them.
Energy doesn't have to travel hundreds of miles to power your home. The future of energy begins where it's consumed.
Education
Two schools, twenty years apart.
The first taught him to work. The second turned a conviction into a business plan he had to defend in front of a committee before anyone would let him build it.
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Vincent grew up in Oceanside, New York, and moved to Southern California in high school — his father had emigrated from Italy under political and economic pressure, and Vincent credits him for the work ethic. He was a certified auto mechanic and turned wrenches to pay his way through Cal Poly.
University of California, Riverside — Palm Desert
UCR opened its Palm Desert campus in 2005 with two graduate programs; the MBA was one of them, and Vincent was in its first class. His master's thesis was the plan for a residential solar company built around energy efficiency first, a custom solar system second, and pre-wiring for battery storage that almost nobody was installing yet. He defended it, graduated, and went and built it.
On the thesis: "It was the blueprint for the entire company. It was such an advantage to put everything down on paper and make it work there before I took it into the real world."
The work
Twenty years on Coachella Valley roofs.
Desert energy is its own discipline. Two utilities with different rules, summer loads that punish an undersized system, HOAs with opinions, and roofs that see more sun and more heat than almost anywhere else in the country. That is the only market he has ever built in.
- 2006
Started designing residential energy systems
Straight out of the thesis and into the Coachella Valley — chosen for the sunshine and for community ties he already had.
- 2014
Founded Mycrogrid®
Partnering with advanced energy-management companies on smart battery systems, back when residential storage was still an argument rather than a product.
- 2015
Published Cut the Cord
The case for treating solar as phase one, storage as phase two, and a locally controlled home microgrid as the destination — written years before the market agreed.
- Today
Still in the room
He works out of the Palm Desert office on Cook Street, and he is still the person homeowners end up talking to when they want the long version.
- Founding member, U.S. Green Building Council — Inland Empire chapter
- Former chair, USGBC Coachella Valley branch
- Consultant to the California Building Standards Commission on the state's green point system
A long inheritance
The first solar patent in the family was filed in 1886.
As Vincent tells it, his ancestor Alessandro Battaglia filed a patent for a solar collector in 1886 — flat and near-flat reflectors concentrating sunlight, with a boiler to hold the heat until it was needed. Generation, storage, and local use, a hundred and forty years ago. The surname means "to battle." He is aware of how that reads, and he likes it anyway.
The utility isn't disappearing. It's changing jobs. Its new job is backup.
The book
He wrote the argument down first.
Cut the Cord, now in its second edition, is where the thinking behind Mycrogrid® was worked out in public: why solar alone was never the finish line, what storage actually changes, and why control is moving into the home. The book page has the chapters, a reading sample, and every place to buy it.
Come by
No sales presentation. Just a conversation.
If you're near the Palm Desert office on Cook Street, stop in. If Vincent is there, he'll hand you a copy of Cut the Cord himself and talk through where residential energy is going — whether or not you ever become a customer.