Marc-Andre Forget at the lab at dcbel in Montreal on Aug. 17. dcbel designed a two-way EV charging station for electric motors. The charging station allows for solar charging as well as using the car as a way to send electricity from the car to the house.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
A Montreal-based company whose electric-vehicle charging technology allows EV batteries to power homes and shave utility bills has raised US$50-million to move into its commercialization stage.
The series B funding secured by dcbel Inc. was led by Montreal’s Idealist Capital, an impact fund that joins Volvo Cars, Coatue Management LLC, Real Ventures and Kevin Mahaffey, founder of U.S. cybersecurity company Lookout, among investors. Impact funds are structured to generate measurable environmental and social benefits along with financial returns
The company’s r16 Home Energy Station offers bidirectional EV charging – that is, the ability to transfer energy both to and from a source – and is controlled by artificial intelligence. It allows consumers to charge their vehicles when demand is lowest, and helps reduce reliance on the grid when demand and prices peak. It can also be used to provide power during blackouts. The system, which helps reduce carbon emissions, can be integrated with rooftop solar installations.
California has been targeted by dcbel for its initial rollout. From there, the company plans to expand to other regions in North America, including Texas and Florida, said Marc-André Forget, dcbel’s chief executive officer.
The company’s research, conducted in San Francisco, has shown most EVs return home after a daily commute with 60 to 70 per cent of battery life remaining. By using 10 per cent of the remaining charge to, say, cook dinner and run an air conditioner during the peak-demand late afternoon period, homeowners can avoid the highest rates and save as much as US$800 annually, Mr. Forget said.
“I’m talking a Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf-size battery. I’m not talking massive Tesla battery,” he said in an interview.
“It’s really a game changer, when you consider inflation, when you consider the impact.”
With solar panels, the system can make a home nearly autonomous with electricity, though the company sees the greatest benefit with a mix of drawing power from photovoltaic cells when needed and being compensated for feeding electricity to the grid on occasions when homeowners are away, for instance. The AI technology allows the device to set up the most efficient schedule for that, Mr. Forget said.
The company has contracted out manufacturing of its Home Energy Stations to Toronto-based Celestica Inc.
The funding for dcbel represents the fourth investment for Idealist, a fund established last year to invest in climate-related technology, including EVs, energy storage and renewables. Idealist co-founder Pierre Larochelle will join dcbel’s board.
Mr. Larochelle said he likes the technology because it addresses growing problems of weather-related power outages and peak demand testing the capacity of electricity grids. Jurisdictions previously thought to have unlimited capacity, such as Quebec, are now seeing the potential for shortages in the coming years. California has dealt with the problem by charging much higher rates at times of high demand, said Mr. Larochelle, who is also chairman of Saint-Jérôme, Que.-based EV maker Lion Electric Co.
The technology used in dcbel’s bidirectional system, the first to be certified in the U.S. for residential settings, allows for some of that demand to be reduced as EVs account for more of the auto market, he said.
“There are going to be more and more electric vehicles on the road, and what people sometimes don’t realize is the batteries on cars are pretty big. And most of the time the cars are idle, so you have this big capacity of batteries that can be leveraged. The way to leverage that idle energy capacity is through those bidirectional chargers,” Mr. Larochelle said.
Mr. Forget said the financing will help the company maintain its Canadian headquarters, where it has about 85 employees, even as its initial markets are in the United States. The company has also had support from the Quebec and federal governments.
“We strongly believe that the Canadian ecosystem is a great place to build a company,” he said. “We have lots of talent. It is not true that talent is only in Silicon Valley,” he said.