A St. Louis-based startup with a goal of developing affordable wind turbines for commercial buildings is making the move to Birmingham, Alabama, after participating in Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator and receiving an Innovate Alabama grant.
The company, Accelerate Wind, is planning to relocate its headquarters to Birmingham within the next couple of months, and it currently has office space in Hardware Park, a business campus downtown there.
Erika Boeing, CEO and founder at Accelerate Wind, said the company was born out of a realization that the solar market was expanding, especially on rooftops, but commercial building owners could not produce their entire energy demand from solar alone.
"There's kind of this missed opportunity for people who want to generate renewable energy but don't have other sources that they can use," Boeing said. "Wind was always a potential option, but the problem was most wind turbines didn't pay themselves back within their lifetime, and so that's what accelerate winds has set out to solve."
Boeing found herself wondering if wind energy increases at the edges of commercial building roofs and if it could be used to produce more meaningful power.
"It turns out that, yeah, because of the way that wind is forced to flow over the edges of buildings, it naturally increases right at the edge, and there's a whole lot of power there that you can produce," Boeing said. "So our company was formed to figure out how we take advantage of that power right at the edges of building roofs."
That was about five years ago. Today, Accelerate Wind has raised $2.5 million in grant and equity funding and is in the process of moving into its pilot stage.
"We have running a prototype for the past couple of years and are now just moving into pilot stage to install in multiple buildings in the real world," Boeing said.
The company is refining its product, gearing up to open a seed round and getting the latest version of its turbine tested at a third-party test site.
"There's a test site in Spanish Fork, Utah, that's been testing wind turbines for the last 30 years, and so we're building a unit and a mock building out there so that we can test the unit and collect really good data on that before we put it on other buildings," Boeing said.
The company plans to grow its team from six employees to 10 within the coming year and, in the long term, scale up by manufacturing its technology and then selling through solar installers.
"A big piece of our plan is that we've designed the turbines to be installable by solar installers, using the people that they would already have on site so that they can do things that they're already good at like customer acquisition and permitting and installation and then sell both solar and wind to the same location and we can kind of create an add-on to the solar markets that already exist across the U.S.," Boeing said.
Accelerate Wind, named among St. Louis Inno's 2022 Startups to Watch earlier this year, is one of several startups that have moved to Birmingham in recent years for the opportunities it offered and decided to stick around.
"We thought we were just gonna be here for three months for Tech Stars and then decided to stick around just because the opportunities were so good. ... We kind of fell in love with the place and solid business opportunities for pilots and things here, and so we're still around," Boeing said.
She called Techstars a good introduction to the community and a valuable channel for connecting with mentors within the community.
"I think that's a that was a big piece of of the appeal. Just excited, high-quality people," Boeing said. "Also, the fact that Birmingham's growing. I know that was something that I could feel immediately when I when I got here. ... This is a really cool place to be and it's small enough where you can potentially have an impact as well."
St. Louis Inno contributed information to this report.
