Businesses and developers often face a steep learning curve when installing clean energy technologies, comparable to solar installations and EV chargers. To get a good deal, they should navigate a fancy bidding process that involves requesting proposals, evaluating bids, and ultimately contracting with a provider.
Now the startup Station A, founded by a pair of MIT alumni and their colleagues, is streamlining the technique of deploying clean energy. The corporate has developed a marketplace for clean energy that helps real estate owners and businesses analyze properties to calculate returns on clean energy projects, create detailed project listings, collect and compare bids, and choose a provider.
The platform helps real estate owners and businesses adopt clean energy technologies like solar panels, batteries, and EV chargers at the bottom possible prices, in places with the very best potential to scale back energy costs and emissions.
“We do rather a lot to make adopting clean energy easy,” explains Manos Saratsis SMArchS ’15, who co-founded Station A with Kevin Berkemeyer MBA ’14. “Imagine in the event you were attempting to buy a plane ticket and your travel agent only used one carrier. It might be dearer, and also you couldn’t even get to some places. Our customers wish to have multiple options and simply learn concerning the track record of whoever they’re working with.”
Station A has already partnered with a few of the largest real estate firms within the country, some with 1000’s of properties, to scale back the carbon footprint of their buildings. The corporate can also be working with grocery chains, warehouses, and other businesses to speed up the clean energy transition.
“Our platform uses loads of AI and machine learning to show addresses into constructing footprints and to grasp their electricity costs, available incentives, and where they’ll expect the very best ROI,” says Saratsis, who serves as Station A’s head of product. “This is able to normally require tens or a whole lot of 1000’s of dollars’ value of consulting time, and we will do it for next to no money in a short time.”
Constructing the inspiration
As a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Architecture, Saratsis studied environmental design modeling, using data from sources like satellite imagery to grasp how communities eat energy and to propose probably the most impactful potential clean energy solutions. He says classes with professors Christoph Reinhart and Kent Larson were particularly eye-opening.
“My ability to construct a thermal energy model and simulate electricity usage in a constructing began at MIT,” Saratsis says.
Berkemeyer served as president of the MIT Energy Club while on the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was also a research assistant on the MIT Energy Initiative as a part of the Way forward for Solar report and a teacher’s assistant for course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures). He says classes in entrepreneurship with professor of the practice Bill Aulet and in sustainability with Senior Lecturer Jason Jay were formative. Prior to his studies at MIT, Berkemeyer had extensive experience developing solar and storage projects and selling clean energy products to industrial customers. The eventual co-founders didn’t cross paths at MIT, but they ended up working together on the utility NRG Energy after graduation.
“As co-founders, we saw a chance to remodel how businesses approach clean energy,” said Berkemeyer, who’s now Station A’s CEO. “Station A was born out of a shared belief that data and transparency could unlock the complete potential of fresh energy technologies for everybody.”
At NRG, the founders built software to assist discover decarbonization opportunities for patrons without having to send analysts to the sites for in-person audits.
“In the event that they worked with an enormous grocery chain or an enormous retailer, we’d use proprietary analytics to guage that portfolio and give you recommendations for things like solar projects, energy efficiency, and demand response that will yield positive returns inside a yr,” Saratsis explains.
The tools were an enormous success inside the company. In 2018, the pair, together with co-founders Jeremy Lucas and Sam Steyer, decided to spin out the technology into Station A.
The founders began by working with energy firms but soon shifted their focus to real estate owners with huge portfolios and huge businesses with long-term leasing contracts. Many shoppers have a whole lot and even 1000’s of addresses to guage. Using just the addresses, Station A can provide detailed financial return estimates for clean energy investments.
In 2020, the corporate widened its focus from selling access to its analytics to making a marketplace for clean energy transactions, helping businesses run the competitive bidding process for clean energy projects. After a project is installed, Station A may evaluate whether it’s achieving its expected performance and track financial returns.
“Once I consult with people outside the industry, they’re like, ‘Wait, this doesn’t exist already?’” Saratsis says. “It’s sort of crazy, however the industry continues to be very nascent, and nobody’s been in a position to work out a option to run the bidding process transparently and at scale.”
From the campus to the world
Today, about 2,500 clean energy developers are energetic on Station A’s platform. A variety of large real estate investment trusts also use its services, along with businesses like HP, Nestle, and Goldman Sachs. If Station A were a developer, Saratsis says it will now rank in the highest 10 by way of annual solar deployments.
The founders credit their time at MIT with helping them scale.
“A whole lot of these relationships originated inside the MIT network, whether through folks we met at Sloan or through engagement with MIT,” Saratsis says. “A lot of this business is about status, and we’ve established a very good status.”
Since its founding, Station A has also been sponsoring classes on the Sustainability Lab at MIT, where Saratsis conducted research as a student. As they work to grow Station A’s offerings, the founders say they use the abilities they gained as students daily.
“All the things we do around constructing evaluation is inspired in some ways by the stuff that I did after I was at MIT,” Saratsis says.
“Station A is just getting began,” Berkemeyer says. “Clean energy adoption isn’t nearly technology — it’s about making the method seamless and accessible. That’s what drives us daily, and we’re excited to guide this transformation.”
