Presented with the problem of running renewable energy on a grid to power a California farm and vineyard, Jorge Elizondo developed a decentralized optimization strategy.
The strategy turned into a company that develops the hardware and software necessary to integrate renewables and batteries on a microgrid to produce sustainable and clean energy. Founded by Elizondo in 2015, Heila Technologies is now a fully fledged microgrid startup based in Somerville.
“There's a lot of companies out there that do microgrids, but the proof is in the pudding," said co-founder and development lead Albert Chan. "Until you actually have a microgrid up and you visit a microgrid and you talk to the technical team, you don't really know if it works or not."
Elizondo, a PhD graduate of MIT, and Chan, a graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management, met in an energy club at the school along with CEO Francisco Morocz.
The three went on to win the MIT Clean Energy Prize and, with the school’s funding, launched the company.
“The ideas came from research at MIT, and the first bit of funding came from MIT when we won the Clean Energy Prize. So that funding really helped jumpstart the business,” Chan said.
Chan said MIT provided Elizondo with the deep, academic research knowledge needed to begin the company, while a project at Stone Edge Farm in Sonoma County provided him with operational knowledge. The company highlights Stone Edge to sell the idea that its renewable energy-based microgrid can be a low-cost and low-carbon solution.
“While he was at MIT, [he] started tinkering with the idea of building modular microgrids," Chan said. "He created this new idea around decentralized control. So instead of a central controller orchestrating everything, you have almost a peer-to-peer optimization strategy.”
The metaphor Chan uses is running a Google search. Since the search engine is decentralized, it goes through different routers to give you an answer.
Chan said the grid allows customers to add or remove energy sources overtime without much configuration.
“[U]tilities will ask different things for inverters,” Chan said. “So they’re all speaking different [languages] and they’re all operating differently … so to be able to orchestrate all of these resources together you have to have a really good control system, you have to have a really good way of making them talk to each other … so it’s a really complex thing, and our solution basically supplies all of that by having a distributed brain.”
Heila Technologies, which joined cleantech incubator Greentown Labs in 2016, has 17 employees in both Boston and California. The startup's approach allows the grid to successfully deal with disasters of all kinds. As the East Coast runs more public safety power shutoffs, or planned outages to make sure that fires won’t spark when the power goes out, Chan said the market has responded to Heila's renewable energy-based idea.
Meanwhile, the West Coast, with a surge in wildfires driven by climate change, has presented another market opportunity.
“There’s a big market on the East Coast and an equally interesting market on the West Coast. California specifically has had a spat of disasters, specifically wildfires," Chan said. "That has really driven the market very quickly for people to buy more batteries and to be able to microgrid.”
Throughout the county, Heila has been able to attract numerous utilities, large commercial industrial facilities and the military as core clients. The startup charges clients fees for the controls it provides, including the software itself and management of the microgrid's hardware or software.
In addition to the MIT Clean Energy Prize, Heila has won funding through the 2016 Cleantech University Prize and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center's InnovateMass program.
Chan said there is much more in store for a company that’s growing quickly in product development and business expansion. Heila is actively looking to develop more partnerships to expand its reach. In May, the startup partnered with lithium-ion battery maker SimpliPhi Power to deploy intelligent energy storage and solar systems at a demonstration project in Shreveport, Louisiana.
“We are at an inflection point where the cost of those resources are low enough that it can become mainstream. But the real big barrier now is integration,” Chan said. “So Heila provides controls, provides an optimization to make the integration of PV (solar photovoltaic power), of batteries, of all these other resources, really clean and efficient within the grid.”
