PHOTOS: Energy innovation takes center stage at Joules Accelerator event

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Gurmesh Sidhu, co-founder and chief product officer of the Canadian company, Moment Energy, made his pitch at the Joules Electrification Pre Pre Game Event simple. "We give electric vehicle batteries a second life. We do this because when an electric vehicle reaches end-of-life, their batteries still have 80% usable capacity left in them," he says. "That makes it perfect for a stationary energy storage application." Moment Energy wants to run pilot programs to prove the concept on issues such as peak-shaving, demand response and fast electric vehicle charging. His company its running a small number of pilots now, financed by a $3.5 million round of seed financing raised last September. It plans a larger Series A round in December, to pay for more pilots. Sidhu is looking for investors and for more partner utilities for its pilots.

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The Joules event attracted 125 attendees to hear discussion on the state of electrification tech in North Carolina and listen to pitches from the 13 most recent graduates from the Joules Accelerator program.

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Arshad Monsoor (left), CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, makes a point at an opening speech for the Joules Accelerator's Electrification Pre Pre Game Event at the EY Wavespace as Joules executive director Bob Irvin looks on. EPRI was a principal sponsor of the event.

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Ryan Kennedy (left), founder and CEO of Charlotte-based Atom Power, represents the entrepreneur's side for the "Build V. Buy Innovation Panel' at the Joules event. With him is Jonatahan Glass, head of venture accelerations for National Grid Partners. That venture capital company was one of the event sponsors.

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Tom Fenimore (left), Duke Energy's director of emerging technologies, and Ron Schoff, director of EPRI's renewable energy and fleet enabling technologies, participate in the "Build v. Buy Innovation Panel" at the Joules event. Duke and EPRI were among the event's principal sponsors.

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Brian Morin, CEO and co-ounder of Greenville, South Carolinas's, Soteria Battery Innovation Group says he is selling safety — specifically for lithium-ion batteries that are at the heart of transportation and industrial electrification efforts. He cited continuing stories of spontaneous battery fires —the most recent involving 400 electric Mercedes-Benz vehicles that caused a shipping vessel to sink off the coast of Portugal — to drive the problem home. "We've got a technology that makes lithium-ion batteries inherently safe," he says. "They're not inherently dangerous. But they are potentially dangerous, if they are damaged or abused or not perfectly made, the will ignite. And when I say ignite, do not think candle. Think hand grenade. We fix that." In tests, he says, Soteria can drive a nail through batteries that use its safety innovations without igniting. His company is already working with a consortium of 106 companies on its safety technology. The companies represent a complete supply chain, from equipment and raw materials producers, through battery manufacturers to end users. And that makes the technology "compatible with every battery that's out there." The consortium's end-users include big names such as Mercedes-Benz, Lenovo and NASA. But he tells the attendees of the Joules Electrification Pre Pre Game event that Soteria needs to increase the number of companies trying its battery technology. "Right now we are trying to grow our list of end users, so that's really the ask for today," he says. "If you have a need for a place to use a battery and its under about about 100 kilowatt hours, we can tackle it today. Bigger things will need more time, but we need some demonstration (projects)."

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Randy Fish, director of business development & policy, at Honolulu-based Shifted Energy, says his company is designed to help utilities design and implement better distributed energy resource programs. It aggregates information from large numbers of customers and converting it into data utility's can use to understand customer habits, what programs are effective and how they can help customers reduce costs while addressing peak power issues for the utility. "We take a lot of data points from a lot of distributed energy resources and we aggregate them, we normalize them and we simplify them," he says. "With that you can do a lot of things." He says the first problem Shifted Energyis addressing involves demand response and demand side management programs. The industry, he says, has for 20 years putting one-way demand response hardware at customer locations to allow the utility to control use when demand grows beyond a utility's capacity. This has tended to be for significant weather related peaks or similar unpredictable power outages. Demand response events are often limited to 10 or so a year as utilities are reluctant to interrupt power for their various customer classes. Shifted Energy uses replaces those one-way communication devices, with interactive communication that makes the devices much more useful. "Now (the devices) are not just for 10 DR events a year, but for time-of-use rates for your customers, for predictive maintenance for your customers," he says. "We use machine learning to forecast how much capacity we can give you from each asset for multiple grid services in a way that maintains customer comfort." "Our job at Shifted Energy is to build trust with your customers and your demand side management programs, so that when you go to them with that heat pump offering they say, 'Yes.' When you go to them with a smart thermostat, they say, 'Yes, what else?' When you go to them with an EV charging solution, they say, "Bring it on. Because I trust you, as a utility, have my back and you are looking out for me.'"

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Jason Huang, CEO of California's TS Conductor says there is "no argument in this room that the power grid is going to be the bottleneck for decarbonization." He says that the conductor in current power lines are based on technology developed in 1908. TS Conductor's carbon fiber conductor wrapped in a protective aluminum shield, he says, can cut line lost on power lines by 50% over current aluminum lines. Line losses currently amount to about 200,000 terawatts of energy annually and it takes a gigaton of natural gas to make enough electricity to overcome those losses. The carbon conductor "gives you the necessary reliability and robustness that you need in the field. It also allows our conductor to be fully compatible with the conventional way of doing conductor installation." His pitch claims the savings can actually pay for the modernization of the power grid." And he closes telling powerline operators, "You can go green and get green." TS Conductor gets its name from shorthand for a Total Solutions Conductor.

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Lori Collins, owner and principal of Collins Climate Consulting and Joules' first executive director, talks to Duke Energy's Tom Fenimore at the Electrification Pre Pre Game event.

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Vince Wong, cofounder and chief operating officer of California based Electric Fish Energy Inc. says the coming demand for the power industry is at a "critical crossroads" as electrification of vehicles and other processes run into the looming threat of climate change. "We are trying to unlock mass EV adoption. But at the same time we're also trying to enable resilient electrification," he says in his pitch at the Joules event. "I think we're realizing we are dealing with our aging infrastructure, which depending on where you live, might have been developed 50 years ago, might have been a century ago." "We are also dealing with the increasing severity of climate change and its impact on climate reliability. Utilities and other infrastructure providers are trying to spend a whole boatload of money per mile to put in infrastructure to achieve these objectives." All of this must be accomplished today, he says, but upgrading the infrastructure for any large scale charging project can require two years to install. And the demand created by new charging peaks can make the grid less stable. He pitched the Electric Fish "plug and play" system using strategically placed batteries to address both issues without infrastructure upgrades. The key, he says, is that charging stations generally operate just 10-to-20% of the time. He says that by using Electric Fish's CoReScore (Community Resilience Score) siting algorithm, communities can find optimum locations to install storage that can provide the power needed for EV charging during peaks and provide electricity during outages and other power fluctuations to the local grid. "We assemble the units really efficiently where they can mate very quickly with grid-restrained sites and deploy in just a matter of weeks not years," he explains. "These units come with load-management software which helps maximize the utilization of these assets."

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Patrick Hanley, chief operating officer for Viridi Parente of Buffalo, makes his pitch. He tells Joules event attendees, "In a world that's driving toward electrification, Viridi Parente is revolutionizing the future of distributed energy" with two product lines. First is the Green Machine line, made up of electric powered land excavators and a backhoe, and its Volta Energy of onsite batteries. "We can store energy from the grid at times when demand is low and distribute it during times demand is high.We manufacture battery pack systems that are deigned and tested to UL standards to be fail-safe in occupied spaces ... designed to provide 50 kilowatt-hours all the way up to 5-megawatt-hours of distributed energy at the point of use." He says the distributed storage will allow utilities to meet increasing peak demands from transportation and other process electrification without fewer costly infrastructure upgrades. "Viridi Parente" is Latin for "Green Parent", he says.

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The problem that Joules Accelerator participant Optiwatt is out to solve, says its Vice President of Business Development Matt Grace, is how the grid system can accommodate the demand for some 20 million electric vehicles in the United States by 2030 to meet the commitment made last year by President Joe Biden. "We are the first truly consumer-focused residential energy application for EV owners. We pay our users by adding insights, data, convenience and ultimately bill savings, rather than the occasional sweepstakes or gift card in the mail" now used to promote EV adoption, he says. Customers can sign up for Optiwatt on their cellphones with "a click of a button, choosing their model and entering their credentials."Optiwatt can then optimize the charging schedule either to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money or more efficiently use local utility rate schedule. It can also help utilities balance their load demands, including down to reducing the strain on specific tranformers. It also calculates how much it costs the customer to operate the vehicle and compares that the to the standard costs of operating a fossil fuel-powered model.

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Michael Beiro, CEO of Linebird of Richmond, Virginia, says his company's goal is to help build a more sustainable and reliable grid safely. And to that end, it has developed a suite of powerline testing and maintenance tools that can mount on its Osprey drones. "The problem is accessing of power lines is dangerous, expensive and labor intensive," he says at the Electrification Pre Pre Game event. "It creates a bottleneck. It prevents the adoption of preventative maintenance strategies that would otherwise save the grid tons of money and eliminate a lot of greenhouse gases ... that just aren't reasonable to do when it's this hard to access power lines." The appeal to utilities, their contractors and service providers, he says in his pitch, is that using drones is "It is 10 times less costly than using helicopters and four times faster than using bucket trucks. It allows you to reach lines on all terrains, ... causes minimum disruption to the public, to wildlife and the environment and most important of all, minimized risk to crew." He says the line worker operates the drone with "boots safely on the ground and getting his work done faster."

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Keenan Johnson's Ribbit Network is the only non-profit presenting at the Joules event, but it had the most ambition "ask" of the entire group. Ribbit, based in Seattle, makes cartoonish green frog-shaped carbon-dioxide sensors that it sells for $275 each. "It is really difficult to deal with climate change if we are not measuring greenhouse cases," Thompson explains. So Ribbit developed the sensors to do that with the goal of distributing enough of them worldwide to be the small-frog equivalent of weather radar. With enough of them operating and feeding data back to Ribbit, the non-profit can map sources of carbon worldwide, determine where it's coming from and monitor how well efforts to reduce emissions are working. "We currently have about 40 sensors, deployed mainly by citizen scientists," he says. "The scale of sensing that we need is we need these sensors on every city block in every city in the world." Thompson is the founder and executive director of the Ribbit, In his pitch, he says, "We need to deploy these things anywhere and everywhere. This is a big opportunity if you work at a big corporation, if you work in a local government ,if you work at a school for you to deploy these things." The sensors are in six countries, but clearly it has a lot of city blocks left to cover.

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Former Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, now a strategic consultant on issues including climate change, climate justice and environmental racism, was speaks to another attendee of the Joules Accelerator's Electrification Pre Pre Game show.

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Ryan Kennedy, founder and CEO of Atom Power, talks to an attendee at the Joules event after his presentation on the "Build v. Buy Innovation Panel" at the EY Wavespace.

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Mudit Sexena of California's XeroHome focused his pitch on the way his company can help utilities implement and refine rebates and other programs to install high-efficiency electric appliance and systems replacements to save customers money and help utilities meet their carbon reduction-goals. He used the example of a customer wanting to replace a dead water heater. People will ordinarily go with what is easiest for them, and since they may not know much about the alternatives, often end up with a heater much like the one they had. He says the utility has a limited window to influence the customer's choice. "A gas water heater installed today is going to keep emitting carbon into 2040," he says, locking those emissions in for years. "But let's say your utility has partnered with Xero Home, and we've developed a web platform that is available to you. This web page is really for information on how to make your home more energy efficient and get the maximum rebates." It provide a service to utility customers. But it also creates more carbon-reduction opportunities for the partner utilities, he says. "XeroHome also allows the utility to look at the aggregate of all homes in their region ... and utility program manager has the opportunity to gain great insights to create better programs and target better and create better rebates and policies for the home."

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E2 Carolinas CEO John Morrison (left) speaks to Joules Executive Director Bob Irvin after the Electrification Pre Pre Game presentations at the EY Wave Space.

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Tiffany Menhorn director utility sales in North America for Netherlands-based LineVision Inc., says her company has built a platform that remotely monitors power lines from the ground using an electromagnetic field (EMF) sensor, to determine the electrical properties of a line, and a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) and sensor that uses lasers to determine the location and motion on the line. "We have 600,000 miles of transmission (lines) in North America. We have a wildly old grid," she says in her pitch. "We need to build new transmission. We also need to optimize what we have right now." The combination of sensors can tell a utility how it's performing and compare that to how it should be performing, Menhorn says. It can detect ice on a line, and it line location and movement sensors are especially applicable for tracking conditions in high-risk areas such as wildfire zones, extension nover large expansions of water and in hurricane corridors.

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"How can you fix something you can't measure?" asks AIDash Inc. CEO Abhishek Singh. His San Jose, California, based company has developed remote monitoring systems that can measure critical metrics for the power, energy pipeline, wastewater and transportation industries using information collected by satellites. The information transmitted to land-based devices build databases to help companies check the performance of lots current infrastructure, see difficult to spot issues and plan for future operations and maintenance. He says it can help companies meet their sustainability goals by reducing waste and emissions. "We can measure, actually measure ... in real time, so you can plan, and see the improvements you are making."

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Some of the crowd mingles at the bar during a break in the Joules Accelerator's Electrification Pre Pre Game event in Charlotte.

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By John Downey - Senior Staff Writer

March 22, 2022, 02:31pm EDT

Electric vehicle-charging solutions and climate change issues dominated the Joules Accelerator's Electrification Pre Pre Game event in which 13 startups in the organization's latest two cohorts made pitches for funding, partnerships and general support.

The event last week — sponsored by EY, the Electric Power Research Institute, National Grid Partners and Duke Energy Corp. (NYSE: DUK) — also featured a panel discussion of industry experts on buying versus building the new technologies needed to address the growing demand for electric-powered transportation and industrial processes — and the infrastructure that may be necessary.

Jason Huang, CEO of startup TS Conductor of Arcadia, California, put it bluntly. "The power grid is going to be the bottleneck for decarbonization," he said.

Vince Wong, chief operating officer of Electric Fish Energy Inc., another company in the Joules cohort, sounded a similar theme.

"I think we're realizing we are dealing with our aging infrastructure, which might have been developed 50 years ago, it might have been a century ago," Wong said. "We are also dealing with the increasing severity of climate change and its impact on climate reliability."

About 125 people, not including those who made some type of presentation, gathered for the event in the EY Wavespace in South End.

Innovation panel

The event kicked off with short speeches from representatives of the sponsors. But Bob Irvin, executive director of the accelerator, reminded the crowd that Charlotte has a long way to go to be seen as an innovation hub for energy. He said that a recent ranking of 50 such hubs in the nation put Charlotte at No. 31.

But the key presentation before startups were each invited to make their three-minute pitch was the "Buy v. Build Innovation Panel," meant to approach new technology from the point of view of the big power companies, research organizations, entrepreneurs and investors.

The panel was made up of Tom Fenimore, Duke 's director of emerging technologies; Ron Schoff, EPRI's director of renewable energy and fleet enabling technologies research; Jonathan Glass, head of venture accelerations at National Grid Partners (the venture arm of the British multinational power company National Grid); and Ryan Kennedy, co-founder and CEO of Huntersville-based Atom Power.

Fenimore represented the "buy" side of the argument. Duke is a major consumer of new technology, he said, and has an interest in seeing it developed by outside partners. Innovation is important at Duke, but it's not the company’s main focus, so it is always in the market for new technologies. But Fenimore added that in the current disruptive environment, he needs "more than just an app."

"The technology has to be as available and reliable as the assets we have today," he said.

'Pole and wire backup'

The panel agreed that tech connected to electric vehicles is hot right now. Kennedy, who represented the entrepreneurial point of view and is focused now on EV charging, says that one advantage is that some entrepreneurs in the EV space can get preorders and sometimes even some revenue before they have a product.

Schoff said he thinks innovation in wind energy is going to be the next mega-trend as the United States starts moving in that direction. But he says decarbonization is a hard sell. He pointed out that buildings cause 21% of the carbon emissions nationally — but only about 4% of the venture capital going into energy-connected industries goes into building innovation.

Glass saw renewables and Tesla as big disruptors for utilities. He said that with more solar-producing power and Tesla's wall battery storage system and its cars used as power sources "poles and wires will just be backup."

Kennedy also cautioned startups to make something "really useful, not just novel." And he said a key when looking to sell into large companies is you have to "make for very little work on their side" if you want them to adopt your technology.

The pitches took up the the bulk of the event. Executives from 12 of the companies made their presentations live in the room. One, German company HeyCharge, presented the pitch for its vehicle-charging technology designed for apartments and high rises with multiresidential customers, made its case with a video. CEO and founder Chris Cardé was slated to speak, but he ended up making a presentation at the South by Southwest film and tech festival in Austin, Texas.

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PHOTOS: Energy innovation takes center stage at Joules Accelerator event

Innovation panel

'Pole and wire backup'

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How this local startup is tapping the growing green-hydrogen market

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