Our Partnership with Elemental Excelerator

Elemental Excelerator, formerly Energy Excelerator, funds innovative startups to help create a 100% clean energy future, starting in Hawaii and Asia-Pacific. Elemental Excelerator invests in energy, water, transportation, agriculture, and cybersecurity companies (up to $1 million USD per company) and opens up a world-class network of investors and customers to help their startup companies change the world. For more information, please visit www.elementalexcelerator.com.

We are currently working on various energy-related initiatives with startups funded by Elemental Excelerator. In particular, collaboration on Demand Response initiatives has begun with the following startup companies:

Bidgely provides an engaging web and mobile app called "HomeBeat" that helps residents visualize and manage their energy usage and costs. HomeBeat displays real-time and historical information on how much a customer is spending on key home appliances. In addition, Bidgely is testing their behavior-based demand response tool to encourage Hawaii residents to reduce or shift the time of their energy usage.  Hawaiian Electric and Blue Planet Foundation (www.blueplanetfoundation.org/powerchallenge) are analyzing the outcomes of Bidgely's behavioral demand response and the effort to assess the potential for residents to reduce load if requested. The results of this project will provide valuable insights to the design of future utility load shifting and pricing programs.   For more information, please visit www.bidgely.com.

Shifted Energy has teamed with STEFFES Corporation (www.steffes.com) to offer a demand response solution using a grid interactive water heater (GIWH).  GIWH technology utilizes the water heater as a "thermal battery" to store energy in the form of heat.  Smart controls on the water heater allows the heaters to cycle on or off based on the near-real time needs of Oahu's electric grid.   GIWH is being evaluated as a resource to provide Hawaiian Electric with various grid services such as regulation, and other possible alternatives in order to help integrate more renewable energy.  At the conclusion of this project, Shifted Energy and Hawaiian Electric will have installed 499 GIWH on Oahu.  The project will provide an ideal test bed to demonstrate grid services.  For more information, please visit www.shiftedenergy.com