Ever felt the heat from a building on a summer day and thought, “That heat is solar energy being wasted, that heat energy cost me more energy to cool my home!”  Well a Sacramento stalwart entrepreneur had the same thought.

Having worked with both PV and Thermal solar, ACR Solar saw an opportunity to increase building insolation, PV efficiency, and provide hot water to houses.  How?  By combining three decades of solar thermal with decades to PV experience to build an efficient solar thermal under a PV array, working to cool both the PV for increased efficiency and the roof for increased insolation all while heating pool or pre heating water for a tankless heater.  Introducing the ACR MegaMat.

The MegaMat is unique with features that allow it to be installed under solar electric giving it better performance and advantages in flexibility, ease of installation, and retrofitting.  All of this allows people to heat their pool, increase the efficiency of their solar, reduce their carbon footprint and protect their house from direct sun heat. ACR refers to this as a PVT hybrid (Photovoltaic Thermal) with international uses.

Other companies have done similar things but none have the experience or ingenuity of ACR Solar. Decades of experience in installing and manufacturing Thermal and PV. While the concept is simple the skills required to make a successfully scalable product are not.

ACR Solar is a local family run employee owned company that has installed solar since ‘79. Founded by Al Rich they made a name for themselves by not only installing photovoltaic, but Manufacturing thermal solar water heaters here in Sacramento. The solar thermal water heaters can function to provide hot water on their own or work with a tankless heater to increase efficiency.  El Novillero Restaurant (off Jefferson Blvd), the Rancho Cordova and Roseville Brookfields Restaurants, as well as the 1,180 square foot Prairie City Assisted Living Home off Willard Dr. in Folsom will use thermal solar manufactured and installed by ACR solar.

For more information contact ACR Solar.

The future of transportation is electric vehicles (EVs), Governor Brown of California has taken action to lay the foundation for the future by setting  a target of  1.5 million EVs on the road by 2025. Sacramento was the recipient of $44 Million in investment from VW lending to an increased amount of capital in the EV sector.  Currently half of all EVs sold in the US are sold in California and the market for EVs nationwide is continuing to grow. The market share of EVs has grown from less than 1% a few years ago to greater than 2% today.  

With the growth of EVs Californians have developed a problem which is, Where do they charge their EVs? The growing demand for charging stations has placed a significant strain on the charging infrastructure.  EV drivers are continually finding themselves looking for spots to charge constantly because they don’t want to be caught with low power or at a low powered charge station forcing them to spend several hours charging. A regional company, Charge-X wants to support the transition to EVs by bringing the Tesla Experience to EV charging.

What is the Tesla experience? There are currently four ways people buy their kwh from charging stations.

• Level one: your typical wall outlet that gives you ~4.5 miles per hour of charging
• Level two: which can deliver up to 7.2 kwh to your car for 26 miles per hour
• Level three: Known as DC fast chargers most places limit your time to half an hour or about 90 miles in that time.
• Level 4: Also, known as the Tesla Supercharger it is the Gold Standard with 120 kwh chargers giving Tesla owners 120 miles in just 20 min.

Tesla not only delivers the most power per charging station, but also is able to accommodate the most cars close to 10 stations on average. Charge-X wants to help all EV users have the efficiency of the Tesla Charging, while illuminating the “white glove service”.Tesla puts 10+ charging stations out delivering more than 120 kwh to a charging tesla. Charge-X wants to do even better, they want multi-charging stations that could be capable of delivering more than 120 kwh with services to help drivers relax while they wait.

The founder of Charge-X, Bill Northup, is reaching out to local utilities, air districts and EV enthusiasts to bring his solution to reality. Working with various groups Charge-X hopes to help push out large groups of charging stations.  Agencies like SMUD, City Governments, other regional utilities, and state boards, have stepped in to help put in EV chargers by funding them, but there has been no equivalent stepping up in the private sector to fill this demand. Why? Margins on energy (just like gasoline) are small. So to justify installing charging stations their needs to be high volume kwh sold.

If you want to learn more about Charge-X contact Bill Northrup at Bill.Northrup@Charge-X.com

“Our hope is that Arch | Nexus SAC will be an inspiration for others to employ similar methods and create places that enhance the community and respect nature.” – Arch | Nexus

Arch | Nexus SAC, a Sacramento architectural firm, is in the hunt for becoming the 16th building worldwide to gain accreditation by the International Living Future Institute for their Living Building Challenge. The Living Building Challenge is a certification that recognizes a building that satisfies excellence in all seven “Petal” categories of sustainable living, which are energy, water, materials, health + happiness, equity, place, and beauty. In essence, a Living Building Challenge certified building is net energy positive, water neutral, and carbon negative.

Walking into Arch | Nexus SAC and its living ecosystem you are welcomed by “Audrey”, the office’s living flora wall, which recycles used grey water while offering beauty to the building’s entrance. The office space offers an open design for innovation to flourish as employees collaborate under natural light filtering in through the office windows and concentrating skylights. The thermal regulators are the employees (community members) as they are notified by smart sensors on when to best open or close the windows for natural ventilation. Behind the walls of this innovative and sustainable layout is where the true beauty lies. In the backroom of the office, engineering at its finest has taken place as all greywater is recycled and stored for later use, and composting toilets act as the building’s own sewage treatment system. In addition to its water recycling process, the building is powered by a number of solar panels offering a minimum of 105% of the offices energy needs.

Now, the building itself and the technologies integrated into its existence are major contributors to the Living Building Challenge, but the commitment by the members of the office (community) to live and adapt to such an ecosystem is a major driving force. Arch | Nexus SAC seeks to enter into a new era of economy called the Purpose Economy. They state, “It turns out architecture is not about buildings. It’s about the people in and around them. The experiences they have. The purpose they serve. This is our why.”

As a steward for buildings of the future, Arch | Nexus SAC ticks the box on the highest level of LEED certification. The building is LEED Version 4 Platinum certified placing it within the top echelon of green buildings. In an effort to follow their why, Arch | Nexus SAC’s inspiration and leadership of others has been recognized as SMUD has taken them on as a partner in developing the SMUD Living Future Project Accelerator program aimed at increasing awareness and green building developers. The accelerator powered by SMUD will ignite the cleantech and green building industry within Sacramento by providing a platform and mentorship for sustainable thinking to thrive. If you are a developer or a cleantech company, who has technology that could supply and help build a living ecosystem or would like to attend a free Accelerator class or tour on Living Buildings and Zero Net Energy, click on the link below to check out the accelerator further.

What do the Dave Matthews Band, Fluid Engineering, and regional clean tech have in common?  Terzo Power, an El Dorado Hills startup. It turns out their CEO was a special projects manager for the band but now has switched to building a clean tech startup in El Dorado Hills.  As noted in a recent SBJ article, “Founded in 2014, Terzo Power is a six-employee company whose primary focus is creating energy- efficient, compact hydraulic power units with “smart” pumps which can be controlled electronically. The technology can be used for industrial purposes, such as stationary plants, or mobile uses for off-road vehicles in agriculture, construction or mining.” This is a good example of a strategy to focus on an overlooked niche market to get a foothold and then expand. Small individual hydraulic power units are very inefficient. Terzo‘s new design for these units improve efficiency by over 80 percent, and reduce the size, weight, and cost of these systems, while improving safety and environmental impacts.  They have been successful in getting a $4 million grant to create a demonstration unit.  They see a $400 million market at least.  It is really cool.  If you want to learn more, click here.

“If we’re successful I do believe we can help save the world. With the grant money, our goal is to develop a proof of concept to improve a hydraulic power unit’s efficiency by over 80 percent, and reduce the size, weight, and cost of these systems, while improving safety and environmental impacts.”

-Michael Terzo, Founder & CTO, Terzo Power Systems

Terzo Power Systems has spent over $1M in their first-generation prototype development and market research and distribution architecture. This places them in perfect position to capitalize on the nearly $4 Million in competitive grant awards from the California Energy Commission and achieve rapid market penetration during their go-to-market phase.

Athena Intelligence  is a Sacramento startup creating AI software to identify the actual cost of resource usage on agricultural land. The idea formed nearly a decade ago when founder David Sypnieski started selling to farmers and realized data driven decisions didn’t seem to exist. For the past decade, David has worked to find out why Agriculture didn’t adapt to new technologies to take advantage of data.  He saw that no one had a complete data picture. So he worked to combine the plethora of data sources to reveal the resources land was actually using; finding real cost and externalities might not be the same between adjacent farms.

“Land, food, water, and energy is Earth’s essential data and the foundation to the global economy.  Yet it goes mostly unused in economic considerations.  Athena believes by democratizing this data, a smarter and more intelligent alignment between people, planet AND profits can be achieved.”

-David Sypnieski

The goal of Athena Intelligence is to enable farmers, food companies and consumers have a data driven collaboration. The cost of overuse of water is not readily recognized by the farmer or consumer till it is too late. Currently, there is no system available that makes it easy for a grower to aggregate all their data to use for analytics, or report to an increasing number sustainability and compliance reports. Food companies struggle with being able to blend their own processing data with their supplier data and integrate it with public resource data to inform on the risk to their supply chains either from shifting climate and evolving resource scarcity.  All the data is scattered across multiple agencies and “silos” in different formats, that is what David has been working on for the past 7 years. Creating Athena Intelligence to automate the gathering, organizing, and presenting of data. Bringing the data together is the first time anyone has put together this data on water, soil, and the local environment.  As the amount of data grows Athena Intelligence has been able to model not only the future but past resource usage and conditions.  

Athena Intelligence has enabled Campbell Soup to streamline core data sets from growers internally while creating a data driven collaboration with growers to plan for future risk and opportunities. Growers will be able to see how decisions affect their long term profitability and value of their business. Athena Intelligence has partnered with Microsoft and UC Davis to automate the Athena platform and are working to scale up Athena Intelligence to prepare for more contract by the end of the year.