Delaware startup teams with NMSU to tackle renewable energy gaps with new battery tech

The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. So how do communities entirely reliant — or hoping to be entirely reliant — on renewable energy sources keep running full time?

New energy storage technology from Visionary Energy, a Delaware startup, aims to address those questions. The company is trying to break into New Mexico’s energy market, starting with a collaboration with New Mexico State University to test how the storage technology would work with the state’s power grid.

Battery storage technology is a rapidly advancing field, but high costs and complex regulations have hindered large-scale utility deployment.

Cue Visionary, which comes in with a power module equipped with an inverter and battery storage designed for distribution grids.

“If there is no sun or there is no wind, then energy can come from that storage technology,” said Constantine Fedoseev, Visionary CEO and co-founder.

The storage tech is still in the early stages and has yet to make it across the so-called “valley of death” — a term used in the startup world for the transition from prototype to a profitable product in the market.

That’s why NMSU is offering up a test pad at its Integrated Digitally networked Enterprise Accelerator Laboratory, or IDEAL, where Visionary can demonstrate the technology.

The national laboratories in the state also offer services like this, but it’s more logistically difficult and expensive to break into those spaces, said Olga Lavrova, director of NMSU’s Electric Utilities Management Program.

“Especially NMSU, my goal was to fill this gap so that if there is this barrier, frankly, that exists for startup companies, then they could come and test out basically the same functionality as national labs,” Lavrova said, “but at the university setting, where we are cheaper, we are more accessible, we can distribute the results to people more freely.”

NMSU and Visionary announced the partnership earlier this month. Fedoseev said work will start in October and could take between six months and a year.

It’ll take place on a square parcel of land at the end of NMSU’s main campus the university is already using to study microgrids, which are small-scale, self-sufficient power grids.

Visionary’s battery storage technology could especially benefit rural communities, where power outages tend to occur more frequently due to older equipment and electricity rates can be more expensive because an electric cooperative is serving fewer people, Lavrova explained.

Fesdoseev added that the battery storage tech can also be customized to a rural co-op’s needs.

He also said it could help cover gaps caused by yearslong delays in utility infrastructure supply chains. It’s an issue investor-owned utilities in New Mexico have struggled with.

“If it takes three years to get a new transformer, what (a) utility can do in the meantime (is) use technology solution by Visionary,” Lavrova said.

Alternatively, the tech can help lessen energy usage happening during peak demand periods, like hot summer afternoons, according to Lavrova and Fedoseev.

Visionary is still seeking project funding from state or national clean-tech programs.

“We aim to help New Mexico as a state to achieve sustainability goals and improve part of supply reliability, and I believe we could ... do it even with lower rate burdens,” Fedoseev said.