infiniRel Making Clean Energy More Reliable and Affordable
Founder & CEO Bert Wank (right) with Nick Gurule (left) and Sig Gonzalez (center) of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM, after successfully collecting proprietary inverter failure data during the month of September.
Santa Cruz Startup, infiniRel Develops Early Warning System to Prevent Key Component Failure in Renewable Energy and EV’s
In the race to transition to electric power and slow climate change, a critical problem to electrification has been overlooked. That problem is the unreliability of a mission-critical component called the inverter. Renewables and EVs rely on inverters, which can blow up, catch fire, or simply stop working without warning. infiniRel makes clean energy more reliable and affordable with an early warning system that can prevent inverter failures.
Bert using the infiniRel “EKG” inverter health scanner for testing a solar inverter on a California solar plant.
Bert Wank, Founder of infiniRel says, “An inverter is at the heart of all technology that uses battery, solar or wind power. Our Inverter Health Scanner is like an Electrocardiogram (EKG) for the inverter. A cardiologist uses an EKG to measure the stress signals in your heart to prevent heart attacks because a heart attack is catastrophic to your system. Our Inverter Health Scanner uses Machine Learning (ML) to identify the failure risk of each inverter so repairs can be made before they melt down.”
infiniRel has won $400,000 in prizes, awards, and grants, including the U.S. Department of Energy sponsored American-Made Solar Challenge in 2020. Later that year they were awarded a $150,000 CalSEED grant from the California Energy Commission. In 2021 infiniRel was the Western Regional Cleantech Open Winner. A voucher from the Department of Energy enabled them to test their Inverter Health Scanner at Sandia National Labs, the technical authority for solar reliability.
infiniRel’s first target market is utility-scale solar power plants where they can quickly make a significant positive impact. In 2021 U.S. clean energy producers lost approximately one billion dollars in returns primarily due to inverter failure. This resulted in less funds available for renewable energy investors to use building more green-energy plants, thus extending the dependence on fossil fuel. Renewable energy producers are eager to solve the problem of inverter failure. infiniRel has a binding pilot test agreement with a globally expanding energy service provider and three additional clients in the pipeline.
After infiniRel fulfills their initial contracts, demonstrating the success of both their technology and business model, they will reduce the size and cost of their early warning system. This will allow them to expand into the e-mobility market. There will be fewer drivers stranded when their inverters fail and fewer malfunctioning EV charging stations. The result is more reliable, affordable electric transportation.
Andreas Schneider, Chief Marketing Officer for infiniRel, said, “Our technology will accelerate the transition to sustainable energy and a carbon neutral future. We are doing important work that will make renewable energy and e-vehicles more affordable and reliable.”
To complete testing on infiniRel’s early warning system and bring it to commercialization they have launched campaign though Wefunder , a crowdfunding platform that democratizes investing. Speaking about the crowd-sourced investment campaign Bert said, “The theme for Earth Day 2022 is ‘Invest In Our Planet’. Crowdfunding makes it possible for anyone to be an investor in renewable energy technology and help stop global warming.”
Bert invites anyone interested in renewable energy to the Silicon Valley Energy & Sustainability Meetup on Thursday April 28 at Cork and Fork in Capitola from 6-8pm.