EnergyBoard and BoardOS deliver major energy demand savings for commercial buildings

Electricity demand is outpacing the ability of many electricity grids to keep up. These strains are fueled by the energy transition occurring in building systems, the rapid development of hyperscale data centers, the steadily increasing use of air conditioning in the context of global warming, and more. Residential customers feel pain in the form of rising electricity costs and increasing risks of blackouts.

Meanwhile, commercial building owners and tenants have two parts to their electricity bills. First, they pay for the total electricity they consume over the billing period (energy charge). They are also billed based on their peak use in any short window across the billing period (demand charge). It is common for demand charges to represent greater than 50% of a commercial client’s energy bill.

Novele provides major demand charge savings to commercial customers by pairing EnergyBoard, an ultra-slim, wall-mounted battery system, with BoardOS, a software layer that uses machine learning to predictively manage storage and discharge capacities to markedly reduce commercial building peak electricity use. Novele also helps customers further reduce their energy bills through participation in demand response programs, where available.

Every kilowatt reduction of commercial building peak demand is a kilowatt of electricity that does not need to be generated by progressively inefficient fossil-fuel plants that utility companies ramp up to meet increasing peak demand loads. Reducing peak demand also helps to maximize the proportion of renewable energy generation in the overall generation mix and reduces blackout and other grid issues, leading to environmental and resiliency benefits all around.

“It’s an absolute no-brainer for any commercial real estate company or building owner to partner with Novele. The electricity cost savings are simply that fundamentally strong; the system quickly pays for itself. The battery, only two-inches thin, features gorgeous design that integrates seamlessly into modern interior spaces, and has demonstrated unprecedented performance in large-scale fire testing. So the system looks incredible, doesn’t take up valuable space, is top-rated for safety, and has massive financial benefits. The broader benefits of reduced carbon emissions and improved grid resilience are phenomenal by-products. We love it and believe that the rest of the world soon will, as well.” - George Perry, President and Founder, boisei labs

Scaling commercial deployments and impact

Novele has already completed its first commercial deployments including live, operational systems with Fortune 50 companies, and has a large and growing sales pipeline across office, industrial, and multifamily real estate, now spanning more than 2,000 buildings representing 2.6-billion-square-feet. Economics are driving Novele’s ultra-fast adoption curve; the company has shown that it can cut demand charges by 25-45%, resulting in typical payback periods of 4-7 years out of the gate, to under 3 years with government and/or utility company incentives in many markets.

The total addressable market for commercial real estate and data center energy storage and load management is huge. boisei anticipates that Novele’s cutting-edge technology and undeniable economic proposition will lead to rapid scaling with cross-industry and cross-geography adoption.

Indeed, Novele will use the Series A funding to expand its engineering, deployment and commercial teams, to scale installations across its active pipeline, and to continue enhancing BoardOS.

"This funding round lets us take Novele from an initial set of live deployments with Fortune 50 companies to the default way commercial buildings and data centers manage power. We’re not asking building owners to make a sustainability trade-off. Novele leads with empirical data that support the value proposition our customers require. This is about trust, as much as it is about the economics of peak shaving and demand response that the system delivers on it’s own.” - Charles Conwell, CEO and Co-founder, Novele

About boisei labs

boisei labs is a US-based, ‘tech for good’ venture studio and family office building and investing in solutions targeting systemic environmental and social challenges through market-driven economics.

About Novele

Novele is an applied AI company for energy in the built environment. Novele makes buildings intelligent, giving them the ability to predict, reshape, and optimize their power in real time. Because that intelligence has to act on physical power, Novele builds and controls the system on which it runs. EnergyBoard is Novele’s distributed energy storage platform, and BoardOS is the intelligence and autonomous operating layer that turns building energy into a controllable, economically productive asset. RippleBoard extends the platform to data centers. Novele’s systems are UL 9540 Listed and approved for indoor installation and are deployed across commercial real estate, retail, and institutional portfolios. Novele has offices in Stamford, Connecticut, and Irvine, California.

About the round

boisei is joined in the Series A with participation from Arup, Locke Health, Barton Malow, and multiple other strategic commercial real estate owners and operators.

For press inquiries, contact Jared Yarnall-Schane, Managing Partner, boisei labs/ family office: jaredyarnall (at) boisei (dot) com