Renew Power Systems Inc.
For more than a decade, Greg Mowry has been working to bring electricity to historically disadvantaged communities around the world. “He was really looking, big picture, at how we can make a grid that really has a larger impact,” says Zach Emond, Mowry’s co-founder in Renew Power Systems—a company born out of research the two conducted at the University of St. Thomas. After years of research, they reached a breakthrough in technology that made power scalable in other countries, and they realized it can be implemented within existing power systems to make them more efficient. “It was originally designed so we could build microgrids, which are these self-contained energy systems that were totally scalable, meaning you could add onto them in the future,” Emond says. “You could build these from the ground up and it acts as a grid made up of microgrids. That translates to our patented technology, as the rest of the world was looking at ‘How do we integrate renewables into existing grids much faster without sacrificing things like stability and reliability?’ ” Their technology recently gained patent approval for large-scale use.
