Glenn Jakins enjoys camping but found he can’t stand the sound of diesel-powered generators when he remained in a campground tucked into the California redwoods many years ago.
That realization put the Lindon-based entrepreneur on a path toward developing a mobile, noise-free, stainless steel generator and launching a Utah renewable energy firm known as Humless, which Jakins figures signifies the opposite of Humvee. The firm has since developed a new product that can jumpstart the residential solar market by enabling people to store the electricity generated by rooftop panels throughout the day to be used once the sun isn’t shining.
Dubbed Universal Energy Managementthis gear is the very first commercially available line which can charge any sort of battery from any sort of DC-to-AC inverter, based on Jakins, the Humless CEO.
“Today you may go back to each one of the 2 million homes in America that currently have solar, and I will look at it and go,’Can I give you electricity storage?’
Humless is one of the hundreds of exhibitors at the Calvin L. Rampton Salt Palace Convention Center, in which 20,000 industry professionals have been gathered for one of the world’s biggest trade shows devoted to renewable energy.
“When we hit this target, by 2030we will more than double our workforce and also add $345 billion in private investment, while offsetting electricity-sector emissions by 35%,” SEIA President Abigail Ross Hopper said. “But we can’t get there on momentum alone. We’ll want policies, competitive collaboration and action from every member of this business to make these goals a reality.”
One policy it hopes to see is a 10-year expansion to the solar investment tax credit, set to commence a stepped-down phaseout next year. This 30% tax credit for residential solar installations is credited for sparking the meteoric growth in solar power since its implementation from 2006. “We’re telling members of Congress to take this particular climate triumph today. You don’t need to wait for a comprehensive solution to do it on our energy future.
An investigation by SEIA reasoned an expansion would boost annual solar investment to $41 billion by 2030, more the double the $17 billion in last year, and might help offset 363 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions during the next year. That would have the emission-reducing effect of carrying 77 million cars from the street or shutting 93 coal-fired electricity plants.
Humless may be a very small business, now employing nine people at a 40,000-square-foot facility in Lindon, but Jakins believes it can help enlarge U.S. reliance on solar by allowing homeowners to store their own solar-generated power and command how to utilize it. The Humless system taps that electricity, no matter how it had been inverted to AC, to control batteries. It also allows homeowners to choose when that electricity may be used for various appliances.
“I will take AC power from 1 origin and take DC power from a different source,” Jakins said. “I will take all of them at the same time, and that I can control that power and do whatever I want with this.”
He figures that a conventional solar-powered home can get rigged using this storage method for $15,000.
On Tuesday, the huge international technology company ABB, based in Switzerland, announced a partnership with Humless in which the smaller company will manufacture its 48-volt energy control units to be marketed using ABB inverters as part of an integrated storage system.
Humless is currently producing five units every week, but Jakins stated he can quickly scale to meet ABB’s needs as they grow.
“I have electrical engineers in Provo that are just dying to get work to have the ability to enter and construct these machines,” he said. “We’ve never had an issue revving up”
He made the system together with his native Africa in your mind.
“The intriguing thing is that the American grid is so excellent. I am from South Africa. We have got a bad grid. On average, every home has roughly four hours of no power a day,” explained Jakins, who immigrated to Utah 29 years ago after graduating from the same Pretoria high school as Tesla co-founder Elon Musk.
Net-metered solar homes don’t go dark when the grid goes down — as long as they have batteries and the gear needed to charge them. We’ve done a great deal of systems in Zimbabwe. They get four hours of electricity a day if they are lucky. So they rely entirely on petrol,” Jakins said. “Where we actually started was in the center of Africa. Now we have brought that technology “
