SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – infiniRel Corporation, an emerging start-up primarily engaged in improving the reliability and long-term sustainability of renewable energy, won the Cleantech Open Western region finals. It is the latest award adding to prizes, vouchers, and grants the company has received, now totaling over $400,000.
The Cleantech Open (CTO) is the oldest and largest cleantech startup accelerator program, with the mission to find, fund, and foster entrepreneurs with ideas to solve our greatest environmental and energy challenges.
While renewable energy in all its forms is the key to our net-zero global effort (the Paris Climate Agreement limits carbon emissions to 1.5-2° Celsius), a major risk of electrification is the unreliability of its core technology.
“We need an early warning system that predicts power failures, including blackouts, and upgrades our new technologies to ‘infinitely reliable,'” says infiniRel’s founder and CEO, Bert Wank, about the company’s mission.
The exponential growth of renewable energy and demand for electrification emphasizes the need for reliable power electronics. infiniRel’s predictive technology is a massively scalable early warning system which predicts power failures for mission-critical electronic components, using proprietary algorithms and Machine Learning.
Sig Gonzalez, Principal Member Technical Staff at Sandia’s Distributed Energy Technologies Lab (DETL) worked with infiniRel during tests conducted with a voucher from the Department of Energy’s American-Made Solar Challenge. Gonzalez said, “If you can identify what’s going out through signatures on the DC bus, maybe the AC bus, and take action before there is an event, I think that it really helps the LCOE, the lifecycle cost of energy of these products, and helps the DoE meet their objectives.”
infiniRel previously won the California Sustainable Energy Entrepreneur Development (CalSEED) Concept Award. The CalSEED initiative is made possible by the California Energy Commission and funded through the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) Program. CalSEED is administered by New Energy Nexus.
