SmartHelio team was one of the 15 startups who were selected from among 600 applications for the Free Electrons program.
The 6th edition of the ultimate energy innovation program – Free Electrons ended in São Paulo, Brazil recently. SmartHelio team was one of the 15 startups who were selected from among 600 applications received for the program this year. Our CEO Govinda Upadhyay and Head, Business Development Maxine Cronier share their experiences here in this article.
The program provided us with opportunities to collaborate and innovate with 6 leading energy utilities from around the globe, including EDP 🇵🇹, CLP 🇭🇰, American Electric Power 🇺🇸, ESB 🇮🇪, E.ON 🇩🇪, Origin Energy 🇦🇺 to deliver cutting edge solutions and co-create the future of energy. We worked on pilot projects to commercially deploy innovative solutions that would support partners’ fast growth.
How Free Electrons program has helped us?
The Free Electrons program helped us to explore further our potential and co-create brand new use cases to disrupt the energy industry. By bringing highly innovative and visionary people at the same table, we created new way to leverage our state-of-the-art technology for new applications – using our forecasting tool, we can now help our clients even BEFORE the plants exist!
As a startup, it was an amazing opportunity for us to closely work and collaborate with utility partners, that helped both parties to understand each other way of thinking and working and thus, get the most innovation out of it! At the end, it was all about partnership – and we need to understand in-and-out whom we were working with to leverage each other strength, explore potential and mutually grow from the relationship. Discussing with like-minded startups who were highly energised to disrupt the industry and ready to collaborate to accelerate the change and help each other.
Chicago – match innovative start-ups with global utility partners to address their challenges
The Free Electrons program began with the Master Module. SmartHelio team along with other startups travelled to Chicago to participate in the event. The Master Module program focused on matching startup solutions with concrete challenges faced by global utilities to outline a collaborative roadmap for the first pilots/projects between the both. Through further one-on-one meetings, the scope of project commenced and solutions were being contracted. The whole experience was energising and stimulating. It was great to see world’s most innovative organisations gathering under the same roof to discuss one unique topic: Innovation to power the future of energy.
For SmartHelio, the one-to-one meetings helped us to better understand our clients and put ourselves in their shoes so we could co-develop customised solutions. Working with mentors and learning from successful case studies, we got insights into the utility piloting process and explore the inner workings of these large corporations.
The global companies participating in the event and other energy industry experts appreciated the prediction analytics by SmartHelio that could prevent downtime in solar PV plants. All this, in an efficient manner to maximise energy generated and optimise OPEX resources – so as to eventually sustain a fast energy transition worldwide.
Sao Paulo – finalize scope of collaboration and present disruptive results
The Final Module edition focused on firming up negotiations and defining projects for scaling and growth prospects. The event was more focused on human interactions, and deliberations on the fact that at the end of the day it was the humans who brought, fostered and sustained innovation to create a real impact. All the startups learnt that this was not the end – opportunities will continue to be developed outside of this module. The program finally culminated with a final pitch event and an award ceremony.
Want to know how we are helping global energy utilities increasing generation using digitalisation?
Watch Maxine, our Business Development Head explaining to the audience.
