infiniRel

Breakthrough Technology Increases Green Energy Output & Reliability—Lowers Cost

Last Funded October 2022

$175,440

raised from 63 investors

Highlights

1
$400K+ in prizes & vouchers from U.S. Department of Energy & California Energy Commission.
2
Patents granted for U.S. & key European markets.
3
Projected revenue from multi-year service contracts by 2026: $160 million.
4
First customer signed. Three customer LOIs.

Featured Investor

Our Team

Renewable energy, electrification, and autonomous transportation are three megatrends that define our future as we fight climate change. Renewables reach a tipping point when they become available, reliable, and affordable. My entire career I have pursued the creation of reliable power systems. Our technology now delivers affordable reliability.

Breakthrough Technology Increases Green Energy Output & Reliability—Lowers Cost

At the heart of renewable energy and battery technology is a component called the inverter. Like the heart it is essential for the flow of life through the system. The problem is that inverter failures are occurring at epidemic proportions. Eighty-nine percent of the maintenance requests at solar plants involve inverters.

Before Willem Einthoven invented the medical EKG, there was no way to know if your heart was functioning well or about to fail. Before our founder, Bert Wank, invented infiniRel’s EKG for power conversion systems, there was no way to know the health of an electronic system—now there is.

Inverter failures take entire sections of renewable energy plants offline:

  • Reducing green energy output causing more fossil fuel to be burned
  • Raising production costs which will trickle down as higher rates for us
  • Contributing to the instability in the power grid
  • Make green energy investments less attractive
  • Cost revenue that could be used to expand and build more plants

Utility-scale renewable energy plants

We are launching our groundbreaking technology at renewable energy plants and microgrids because that's where it can make the biggest immediate impact to decrease global warming.

The Supply Chain Crises Makes Your Investment Even More Essential

Inverters and the necessary parts to repair them used to take a few weeks to replace, now they can take up to a year. This means the green power wasted waiting for repair is increased several times over resulting in more CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere.


Your Investment Will Help Prevent Blackouts and Add Stability to the Grid

When the power goes out it’s serious. People can die from heat or cold, food spoils, water may not be drinkable. Everyone’s misery index goes up and work can’t get done. We all ask, “How long will this last?”

The Texas grid outage on May 9, 2021, caused a domino effect of inverters disconnecting from the grid. Within seconds Texas lost nearly 25% of all solar power generation in the state. This added to the cascade of events that left more than 4.5 million people in Texas without power, some for as long as four days.

In the detailed root cause analysis by NERC a key finding is that the, “industry is not proactively identifying abnormal performance issues of inverter-based resources.” infiniRel’s EKG scanner can provide exactly the type of analysis and help to prevent blackouts.

You Can Help Keep Energy Costs Down

Inverter failures can cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage to equipment. The loss of income while the inverter is out, magnifies that cost many times over. The expense overruns this causes in operation and maintenance (O&M) add up to billions of dollars in lost revenue each year for the industry. These out-of-control costs will eventually drive up the cost of energy for all of us.

Our target is to reduce downtime events by 75% and maintenance costs by 50%, safeguarding production costs and helping to keep rates from rising.

Help Development of New Renewable Energy Plants

High O&M costs have contributed significantly to a serious underperformance of renewable energy investments. infiniRel’s technology will improve the bottom line for solar and wind asset owners which will:

  • Free up money that can be invested in additional green plants.
  • Make renewable energy plants more attractive to investors.
  • Add to the financial stability of the green-energy market by increasing the economic return and energy output from existing plants.

Why Now 

The failure rate has increased as renewable energy plants age and inverters go out of warranty. Along with the supply chain issues, shipping expenses have soared compounding the expenses to replace inverters. Investors and analysts have begun to notice the underperformance of renewable energy investments. There is even chatter about a “dotcom-type-bubble” in renewable energy. 

All of these factors now have the owners of renewable energy plants looking for ways to reduce the O&M expenses and increase the revenue. With your help, infiniRel can provide the technology needed to safeguard the growth and profitability of their plants and the industry.

infiniRel’s inverter EKG Health Scanner is the first of its kind. No one else has a system that actually measures electronic signals to accurately diagnose problems and provide solutions.

Our Predictive Technology Utilizes AI & IoT.

Our EKG is a hardware-enabled, algorithmically driven IoT device that predicts inverter failures. By tapping into the signal structure of each component, infiniRel’s system can tell specifically which are in danger of failing and when.

We use our customized machine learning algorithms (a type of AI--Artificial Intelligence) to interpret the stress signals and calculate an individual risk score for each inverter. We display those results via a dashboard for the technician to use in scheduling maintenance and ordering parts ahead of need.

The revenue generated from phase one in renewable energy plants will allow us to reduce the size of our technology and scale up production for commercial use.

infiniRel is accelerated, technically validated, and we have our first customer. We are gathering additional machine learning data and preparing to go to market.

infiniRel has won more than $400,000 in prizes, awards, and grants, including the U.S. Department of Energy sponsored American-Made Solar Challenge in 2020. We have a binding pilot test agreement with a globally expanding energy service provider and have three additional clients in the pipeline.

A voucher from the Department of Energy enabled us to test our system at Sandia National Labs, the technical authority for solar reliability. Future-forward, we'll continue to apply for funding opportunities like CalTestBed, and grants and accelerators for clean technologies.

Microgrid developers have their finger on the pulse of the renewable energy industry and recognize that infiniRel technology will help them deliver their goal of reliable, affordable, secure power. Developers are beginning to build infiniRel multi-year service contracts into their budgets.

Once funded: We’re only six months from revenue. 

Projected revenue in 2026: $160 million

infiniRel’s business model is grounded in multi-year Service-Level Agreements, a successful model adapted from the telecom industry, which demonstrated that uptime can be achieved to ‘five nines’ or 99.999%. Every solar plant and microgrid is unique and carries different risks, costs and failure rates.

Our tiered pricing, based on our risk analysis of the systems’ production and inverter health, allows customers to build our fixed fees into their maintenance budgets. We maximize our impact by first understanding the customer’s situation, then quoting our solution in $/megawatt, while considering the age and size of the plant.

When our client experiences a gratifying ROI and rapid payback, they are likely to continue with our annual service for the remainder of the system’s lifecycle. It is clear that our service immediately translates to lower operational costs, increased operational stability, and higher revenues. Better margins mean more investment in clean energy and lower reliance on the need to burn fossil fuels.

Europe will be the second target market after the US, due to its growing share in the global solar marketplace and its large base of installed (aged) inverters. Then we’ll expand worldwide to the Asia-Pacific Rim, Middle East, Africa, and South America.

Companies that monitor inverter data are good at aggregating numbers, whereas infiniRel extracts and processes signatures in real time. We build our own database through AI, and allow operators to make informed decisions pre-failure. What’s more, our US and European patents ensure our technology is ahead of the competition.

Image of our Team of Global innovators and Pioneers

infiniRel’s team members are veterans from the solar, semiconductor, automotive and telecom industries, who have demonstrated expertise in reliability.

To slow climate change our world is going electric. You can help by investing in infiniRel clean tech innovation.

Your investment will help us complete testing on our early warning failure system and bring it to commercialization which, in turn, will increase uptime at solar plants and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. After closing initial sales and proving the success of both our technology and our business model, we’ll raise equity to help scale up the business and scale down the size of our early warning system. Then we will enter the e-mobility markets. 


Downloads

Overview