Off the Grid
Silent Power’s new products are paving the way for dependable green energy.
Silent Power founder Doug Hamilton wants to make the energy in your home and office smoother, cleaner and greener than ever. His company’s inverter/charger product, which can convert energy from solar panels and wind turbines into electricity to power homes and offices, hit the market in October, and it’s making waves in energy—literally.
“We take a perfect mathematical sine wave and then force the electronics to follow the sine wave. As a result, the output of our inverter/charger is actually better power than you would get from your outlet,” Hamilton says. “It’s cleaner, it’s more precise and it doesn’t have the variance that the output does in your outlets.”
The result is the first inverter/charger that can produce what Hamilton calls “picture perfect” power, which appears on an oscilloscope as a perfect sine wave.
To make the product commercially available, Silent Power teamed up with plant layout experts from Enterprise Minnesota in January to optimize its space for today and for expansion.
Cramped in its 3,600-square-foot location, Silent Power needed a bigger space with offices, a conference room and an engineering lab in addition to the production area. The company was considering renovating its current space to fit these needs. But with help from Enterprise Minnesota (and a surplus in commercial real estate), the company found what it was looking for in a 5,200 square-foot building in Baxter.
Peter Nelson, CFO and chairman of Silent Power, estimates that Enterprise Minnesota’s plant layout service saved Silent Power $20,000 in renovations. “Enterprise Minnesota did a great job in offering alternatives and making the existing space as desirable as it could be,” Nelson says. “Their design, although good, made us re-examine whether it made sense to stay in the space. If we were going to build a whole new plant, we would engage them again.”
Once the new building was renovated, Enterprise Minnesota also helped the company implement lean processes and provided strategic management services in facilitating the development of its production process.
What to do with this “picture perfect” power product? According to Hamilton and Nelson, the inverter/charger can be used to create electricity from any renewable power source, ranging from wind turbines to solar panels that are available today to new energy sources not yet identified.
The inverter/charger is also an integral part of the company’s latest innovation, a battery backup power source that will be available before the year is out. The backup system will switch instantly to stored power during an outage, eliminating the risk of electronics like computers and televisions going haywire with the normal split-second switchover time and subsequent power surge seen in generators. It also boasts an even flow of power, as opposed to the dimming and surging of typical generators.
“Until recent years, the solar, wind-type, green market has consisted of a lot of people who are more homespun types willing to live with less than perfect power. They don’t care about the switchover so much because they’re just happy to have power off the grid,” Hamilton says. “But now our clientèle is becoming more sophisticated, and people want pure power all the time.”
With power that’s better and greener, what’s not to love? Todd Headlee, CEO, believes the company’s products will ultimately become part of a “smart grid”—a renewable power grid that would help take pressure off the traditional grid by running during peak energy-use hours.
“To me, it’s very similar to my well,” says Nelson. “When I turn the spigot, I expect water to come out. I don’t know whether the well is running or whether it’s city water or what. All I know is that if I turn the faucet, I’ve got it.
"Our goal is to get to the point where residents or business have power whenever they need it," Nelson continues. "It should be totally seamless, wheter the power is coming from their own sources like solar panels or turbines or whether it's coming from the grid or whether it's energy that's stored. This will allow utilities to optimize all of the generating capabilities they currently use, without building new plants and minimizing building new power lines."