You Can’t Unring a Bell!

You Can’t Unring a Bell!

Federal policy is set. Public funding is aligned. Private investment is increasing, and consumer demand is growing. Ring! Ring!

The U.S. needs an estimated $2.1 trillion in capital investment by 2030 to put us on a path to a near-zero emissions economy – and a huge part of that investment will go to expand the nation’s electrical system to accommodate?the increased electrical load due to vehicle electrification (both passenger and fleet).

That’s where the company I launched on November 1st is focusing our investment. Rhythmos (rhythmos.io) has built a platform to help stakeholders across the entire energy ecosystem extract dormant value while facilitating a cost-efficient transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy and decarbonized transportation.

The company may be new, but the idea has been in the works for years, influenced by the lessons I’ve learned during my time in the industry as a builder of a DERMS/VPP platform and a provider of software-defined grid-edge gateways.

Rhythmos opens a tremendous opportunity to drive the transformation from the ends: Linking wholesale markets, bulk power generators, utility transmission and distribution systems, commercial EV fleet operators, and even individual EV owners together to drive efficiencies, optimize demand, enable intelligent fleet charging/discharging operations. Rhythmos creates a platform and incentives for all participants to participate actively in the transition while sharing its economic benefits and filling a critical gap in the market.

Driven by public policy and consumer demand, EVs – cars, trucks, and busses, individually and in fleets – have emerged as the prime movers to reverse transportation’s outsized contribution to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. Decarbonizing transportation is a vital global priority and a substantive growing market opportunity. Considering current projections, the annual demand for electricity to charge EVs will surge from 11 billion?kilowatt-hours?(KWh) today to 230 billion KWh in 2030. That’s equivalent to 5% of the total current electricity demand in the country!

Fleet Managers considering electrification focus almost exclusively on transportation concerns like vehicle cost, maintenance cost, fuel costs, and operational range. They rarely consider the state of the distribution grid at their chosen location – until they face long lead times and expensive charging infrastructure upgrades or unexpected peak demand charges that wipe out their expected savings. This lack of coordination stresses electric grids already near the breaking point, which cannot accommodate the anticipated additional demand from transportation electrification.

Meanwhile, we have an aging infrastructure, the industry is staring at major supply-chain constraints, and they’re squeezed by a reduced willingness on the part of regulators to rate-case capital investments for grid modernization. All this creates the need for transparency and optimization among all ecosystem participants and decarbonizing asset stakeholders – utilities, electric vehicles, commercial EV fleets, solar, grid-edge DERs, and other types of grid assets alike.

Existing point-oriented solutions in the market today, no matter how eloquent their design, need to improve in their ability to extract dormant value and maximize the ROI available to EV fleet managers, aggregators, and utilities alike. The energy grid is fluid and dynamic. Utilities are a major stakeholder in solving the electrification challenges, as are fleet owners. You must optimize the entire ecosystem to extract value for maximum stakeholder benefit. That’s what we have set out to do.

Rhythmos assembled leading minds from the industry to build an optimization platform capable of producing practical solutions to some of the most complex challenges in the industry. The platform we designed runs silently behind other enterprise applications and fleet systems and solves dynamic problems with minimal user oversight in near real-time.

The leading hires we’re announcing are Jeff Berkheimer as SVP of Product, who is focused on developing our platform, and Mark Rawson as SVP of Strategy and Partnerships, who is building out our relationships with customers and partners. This leadership team brings unparalleled experience in running one of the most innovative mobility commercialization collaboratives in the world. Their expansive experience covers virtually every group within one of the US’s largest and most innovative municipal utilities, encompassing modernization and technology innovation, data science, systems operations, system planning, distribution operations engineering, grid-edge battery storage, and demand response program design.

In short, we understand the problem and what’s required to fix it. ?

To keep us on track, we surrounded ourselves with truly impressive Industry Advisory Council members and an experienced Board of Directors. They include Dan Grossman, Henry Bzeih, Neetika Sathe, Paul De Martini, Logan Grizzel, and Mark Loch. This team of industry experts gives the company unparalleled counsel in connected vehicles, mobility, vehicle electrification rate design, carbon-reduction policy, automotive and utility innovation, and finance to help guide our roadmap and vision.

Our mission is to drive intelligent energy delivery and use for a world that moves on electricity. We hope you come along with us for the ride. Ring! Ring! Ring!

Please visit our website at www.rhythmos.io to learn more and join us on this journey.