InRange
Problem addressed
There remains significant ‘untapped potential’ for generating solar energy in the commercial and industrial built environment. Many complexities and hurdles in the energy procurement workflow contribute to this including feasibility studies, grid constraints, contractual and financial friction, procurement and installation, operations and maintenance, settlement and energy sale.
Overview of start-up
InRange is an enterprise power procurement platform. They are taking a tech-enabled, AI-based approach to streamlining every part of the process to accelerate the adoption of clean energy, making it fast and financially viable (in revenue generated for owners, savings for tenants, and reliable energy at scale for data centres). Their platform empowers tenants and landlords to turn their commercial real estate assets into renewable energy power plants by using AI-based technology to streamline the entire energy procurement process. InRange connects these assets into a distributed energy network, where all network participants, including data centres, can buy and sell excess energy on the InRange Marketplace.
What makes the start-up innovative?
By connecting buildings to a distributed renewable energy network where they can buy and sell excess energy, InRange’s model encourages up-sizing of solar installation as opposed to the traditional recommendation of right-sizing. Excess energy is sold at fixed export tariffs to other customers on the network. They also aggregate distributed excess generated energy into multi-MW blocks with reliable production curves, which can then be sold to large energy buyers that have hourly local matching procurement goals, like data centres. This creates a new asset class from the built environment as a viable alternative to utility grade solar or wind. Data is collected as part of the entire process from the live network and is then fed back into InRange’s AI-models to further optimise the platform.
How the start-up has been designed to scale-up quickly
Every part of the InRange platform is built to accelerate traditionally slow processes to facilitate scale. Their platform can generate feasibility studies with accurate generation/demand forecasts and financial models which optimise for locality, grid connectivity, and other factors across hundreds of buildings within a portfolio in a matter of minutes. InRange’s pre-approved legal and contracting process is built to scale repeatably across tenants and landlords. Their tech-enabled procurement process and network of trusted tier 1 installers accelerates the time to commercially operational. Additionally, their optimised AI-based supply and demand matching maximises revenue and savings across the network to encourage expansion across the customer’s portfolio. Every additional building streams more data into InRange’s models, further optimising them and improving their speed and ability to scale.