Small startup Go Electric lands $3M military contract for microgrid system

ANDERSON – Start-ups don't get much smaller than Go Electric. It has just three employees. Its rented office in a business incubator here doesn't even have its name on the door.

What Go Electric does have is a $3 million federal contract that it hopes will prove its street cred in the fast-growing energy microgrid business.

"We were unbelievably elated when we found out we won it," CEO Lisa Laughner said of the contract that Go Electric nabbed to build a backup power system for Camp Smith, a Marine Corps base in Hawaii that's home to the Pacific Command.

Laughner was sitting with her staff, all two of them, at the incubator office last month awaiting the arrival of the first pieces of its microgrid system for testing. The initial tests and demonstrations are occurring now through August at another local business incubator where Go Electric leases industrial space. By September, Go Electric will take possession of two trailer-sized diesel generators that will provide most of the power for its microgrid and ship the whole shebang to Hawaii for installation this fall.

Laughner's already thinking beyond the field tests and the upcoming demos in Hawaii to the military brass. She's thinking about the potential for Go Electric to profit from the growing demand for backup power systems, or microgrids, by governments, companies and individuals. It's a global market that's expected to be worth $40 billion by 2020.

"If we perform well on this," she said of the Hawaii contract, "it could open the doors for us to be invited to projects, hopefully around the world."

If this all sounds a bit exotic for an Indiana company, it shouldn't. Indiana has long-established expertise in battery technology (think Delphi and EnerDel) and diesel generation (think Cummins or Caterpillar), which are the favored power sources in the emerging world of microgrids.

"We've got a good critical mass for this important new technology here in Indiana ... and Go Electric is kind of like the lightning rod," said Peter Schubert, director of the Lugar Center for Renewable Energy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Demand for UPS, or uninterruptible power supply, is as old as Ben Franklin's 18th century experiments with kites and lightning, but new battery breakthroughs and advanced software for electricity management are making UPS more affordable and opening doors for companies like Go Electric. Driving the demand is the increasing instability of electrical grids, even in the U.S. and Europe, as intermittent power from solar and wind energy is spliced into the electric grid, making it difficult to ensure a smooth, consistent supply of juice to customers.

The military is an early buyer of microgrids for its field operations and, now, military bases, to ensure that the bases will have power if the electrical grid goes down. The microgrid installation the Marine Corps is building for Camp Smith is meant to be a pilot program that could be installed at other bases if it works in Hawaii.

The Camp Smith microgrid will be a first-of-its kind system that Go Electric juryrigged using its trademarked Blinkless technology, which allows a smooth switch to a backup electrical system without any noticeable blip in the power supply. It uses powerful batteries that supply instant power when the regular electric source fails. (Go Electric shares the Blinkless patent with Mechanical Electrical Systems Inc. of Indianapolis, which helped develop it.)

"Pacific Command does not want their systems, their radar, their communications to go off at all," in case of an electrical outage on Hawaii, Laughner said.

With the Blinkless system, "When the power goes out, you don't even know you're off the grid," said Tony Soverns, engineering director at Go Electric.

To meet the electrical needs of the 220-acre Camp Smith — which equal the power consumed by 2,000 homes — Go Electric's 2 megawatt microgrid combines eight hybrid bus batteries with two Caterpillar diesel generators. The huge generators must be housed in insulated buildings to deaden the diesel roar.

Go Electric is using several contractors, including Generac Power Systems of Wisconsin, to build the Camp Smith system, which it hopes to have up and running by the end of the year.

Laughner, a Purdue-educated mechanical engineer, worked at engine maker Rolls-Royce before getting the bug in 2008 to start a company of her own. She hooked up with Soverns and a former colleague of his at Delphi, Alex Creviston, to delve into new forms of UPS systems. The result was Go Electric.

The $3 million military contract is paying for most of Go Electric's expenses so far, but another $500,000 to $1 million in funding is needed by the end of this year to keep things going, Laughner said.

Go Electric is looking to develop smaller microgrid systems of 30 to 250 kilowatts for civilian use, such as by companies or apartment owners. It hopes to bid on contracts to build systems for the City of New York, where officials want to get microgrids in place to avoid future outages like the one in 2012 from Hurricane Sandy that wiped out part of New York's power grid and caused widespread havoc.

Paul Mitchell, president of Energy Systems Network, an Indianapolis initiative to promote clean energy, said microgrids can help integrate renewable energy like solar and wind into the bigger electrical grid.

"There are a lot of companies in this state that have a lot of potential in microgrids and UPS," he said. One big hurdle he sees: How willing governments and companies are to pay the fairly steep costs for backup power and microgrid systems that companies like Go Electric want to build.

If sales of smaller units catch on, Laughner hopes to grow to 20 employees by 2016. She can't see moving operations out of state.

Indiana "is a good state to be in when you're in this space. There is a lot of engineering knowhow to tap into."

Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at (317)444-6483. Follow him on Twitter: @JeffSwiatek.

Go Electric

Business: building microgrid systems that create uninterruptible power supply for customers

Founded: 2011

Employees: 3

Address: 2705 Enterprise Drive, Anderson.

CEO: Lisa Laughner

Sales: negligible

First project: building a $3 million backup power system for Camp Smith in Hawaii.