“Solar is not only a good industry to get into from an environmental perspective; it’s also a fiscally responsible alternative.”
When Omeed Badkoobeh came across solar-powered homes while in California for a university summer course, he was inspired by its potential. After a few years in China, where he saw the tangible impact of both enormous industrialization and overwhelming pollution, Badkoobeh returned to the U.S. and began work on what would become Yotta Energy, the solar storage solution company he co-founded with his partner, Vikram Iyengar.
“We began Yotta with the idea that creating a simplified energy-storage solution would have positive global impact,” Badkoobeh, 36, says. This optimistic vision has proved compelling: What started out as a self-funded, two-person venture in Badkoobeh’s garage in Austin has attracted investors like SWAN Impact and SeedPod Investments.
Badkoobeh acknowledges that Yotta’s success comes in part because of the dynamic of the market around it: Their approach has benefited from maturing solar technologies, including increasing affordability and ubiquity.
But Yotta has also experimented and pushed further than others to integrate solar and storage technologies. The company’s decentralized solar storage solution uses intelligent software to optimize energy efficiency that challenges standards for bulk energy storage systems.
Their technology allows them to incrementally offer storage, expanding it over time — a technology breakthrough with potential to influence how others approach the market. “The next frontier is storage,” Badkoobeh says. “Our mission is to make storage synonymous with solar.”
With rapid advancements in solar technology across the globe, Badkoobeh thinks we’ve reached the point where combining solar and storage makes economic sense. As he describes it: “Solar is not only a good industry to get into from an environmental perspective; it’s also a fiscally responsible alternative. We can produce a kilowatt-hour wherever the sun shines cheaper than it would cost to build a power plant or run a diesel generator.”
Read the full interview here.
