Imagine being able to go to your neighborhood hub to charge your car when the power is out. That’s what one California tech enthusiast has envisioned.
The battery the company produces is six feet by four feet and provides ultra-fast charging for electric vehicles (EVs), and the company also developed its own software. The main goal is to provide backup energy that can deliver electricity hundreds of miles away in five minutes, Kamal said.
“The software is able to directly talk to electrical utility servers, can use existing data to plan for when exactly an electrical outage will happen, and can have the energy stored and feed energy back in the times the electrical grid is having a crisis or a ‘flex alert’ event which happens in the Bay Area,” he said.
Kamal said there are two types of battery. One is a 40-kilowatt battery that can power up to 40 homes for about a day. The second one is a 100-kilowatt battery that can power 80 to 90 homes. The battery gets recharged by the sun or from the grid.
The idea of community batteries originated when Kamal was writing his thesis at Michigan Technological University and working on electric vehicles at BMW. He tried to create a business model based on decentralized energy storage and fast charging without compromising a battery’s health and longevity.
Kamal noted that the current electrical grid is very old and needs to be updated or transformed to fit modern needs.
“We need technologies that can transform the electrical grid in a way that it’s non-obtrusive and it continues to keep operating. And that is what we’re trying to do here,” he said.
While developing his ideas, Kamal attended a variety of renewable energy events and eventually met his co-founders at a hackathon event. Together, they started the company in 2020.
One of their biggest challenges is trying to source materials domestically to lower the cost.
“That’s one of the key things that you need to solve. You know, the global supply chains—especially in power chips, batteries—are global, and you want to get to domestic products and beat the price,” he said.
The company’s products have been introduced in locations such as Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York. They were also sent to Boston for a non-tactical U.S. Air Force operation.
“So the idea is that the Air Force is trying to turn their non-tactical electric vehicles into electric so that we can transport the cargo from one place to another. And generally, at an airstrip, you would expect there is very little grid infrastructure, so you can drop a unit there, work with a very low amount of power, and still do very fast EV [charging],” Kamal said. “So that’s a big contract for us. We have started to deliver on that, and then we have started to work with some other divisions of the [Department of Defense] as well.”
The company is also working with fleet operators such as dairy businesses and logistic companies.
