Venture for America Company Spotlight with VCharge, located in Providence, Rhode Island:
VCharge uses decentralized, market-based principles to enable residential electric heaters, electric cars, and other transactive loads with embedded storage to engage in rapid demand response. VCharge technology brings real value to utilities, grid operators, and end users today and into the future.
VCharge technology fundamentally changes how: 1. Electric grid operators and utilities provide secure, stable, and reliable power; 2. People heat and cool their homes and businesses, and power their vehicles; 3. Renewable energy generators deliver and sell their output.
Vcharge tells us more:
1. Tell us about your company.
The company was formed when Jessica Millar decided to stop teaching math at Brown University and instead start a company that could help make significant renewable energy penetration on the electric grid a reality. Originally planning to develop a distributed system for charging (and discharging) electric vehicle batteries, she soon came to realize that other, more available storage technologies existed that could be controlled immediately. The company joined a pilot program with the New England grid operator (ISO New England) to provide grid services using Electric Thermal Storage heaters.
Jessica also joined up with Dave Durfee, a principal at Bay Computer Associates of Cranston, RI to develop the necessary hardware and software. VCharge put hardware in the field in the winter of 2010, and successfully provided Regulation Service to ISO-NE in March of 2010.
Meanwhile, on an island in Maine, George Baker was working with the community of Vinalhaven to develop a community wind project. Jessica approached George and offered to help the community by using excess wind energy generated during the winter months to heat peoples homes with electric thermal storage heaters. The project proved very successful, and by July, George had joined Jessica and Dave on the VCharge team.
Since that time, the team has grown to almost 20 people, including employees, subcontractors, and engineers at Bay Computer working on the VCharge SmartBricksTM system. We are installing equipment this winter in Concord MA, E. Stroudsburg PA, and possibly Nova Scotia. We are leading a transformation of the electricity generation, transmission, and distribution system towards what we call Transactive Load; load that can react to what is happening on the grid, and participate in markets for electricity and other grid services.
2. What does your ideal Venture Fellow look like?
We are looking for two types of people. Our operations team is looking for those individuals with a reasonably technical background; a knowledge of the technology and economics of the energy and/or electricity industry is very helpful. People who know the difference between power and energy, and know what a locational marginal price is, are finds for us.
On the technical side, we are looking for coders who have had some intern experience with full cycle software development processes: design, unit testing, code review, etc. The best candidate will relish algorithms and mathematics, will have 3-4 years of experience in C, Python or Java, and an interest in NOSQL databases, Scala, test driven design and networking issues.
3. Provide a fun fact about your company.
We are in the process of planning an annual VCharge technical retreat in Maine, where George owns a summer house. One of the long-term ambitions of the company is to see Maine moved off of oil and onto renewable energy, starting with the islands of Vinalhaven and North Haven where George helped with the financing and permitting of the largest community-owned wind farm on the East Coast.
The younger crowd is wrastling over selecting sporting events to go along with roughly once-a-month company dinners. Suggestions range from ultimate frisbee to a water pong tournament. There is also the question about whether competitive Tetris should count as a sporting event.
This quilt in our office is a mathematical whimsy. It is a rectangle tiled by squares – but with a twist: no two of the squares are exactly the same size. This is a tricky thing to do! The secret behind the quilt is that it is a graphical representation of an electric grid, where each square is a wire of resistance 1 ohm, the height of the square represents how much current flows through it and the width of the square represents the voltage drop. In fact, if the quilt were etched on copper and a voltage was applied across the horizontal edges, this representation would become reality! When Jessica brought the quilt in, she joked that it was a high-security map of transmission lines in Iowa – but we’ve looked into that, and can assure you that in fact the electric graph came from a high school physics textbook.
4. What is your daily office routine like?
Our daily office routine is more of an ebb and flow than a routine. While the principals of the company are in the office almost daily, the consultants and other employees come and go based on the tasks at hand on that given day. Whether our team members are in the office or in the field or working away in Boston, we are all constantly connected via phone and web, therefore allowing us to be as productive as possible from every location. The one constant in our day-to-day operations is our weekly Tuesday requirement that all members be in our Cranston office for the day. This allows us to focus on project management and to collaborate our ideas on a variety of topics.
To find out more about VCharge: