A Saint Paul, Minnesota, startup company is developing an energy storage system to help businesses lower their utility bills and keep the lights on during power outages.
Vessyll was founded in 2020 by Adam and Zahra Iliff, who moved to the Twin Cities after deciding they wanted to raise their family in the Midwest. The company was recently selected to participate in a regional clean energy accelerator program and is deploying its first system this month as part of a pilot project on a northern California microgrid.
The U.S. energy storage sector is an estimated $7.5 billion annual market with several big-name players such as Tesla, Toshiba and Siemens already holding a stake. Most of the activity has been around large battery systems designed to help utilities manage the electric grid as they also install more variable wind and solar generation.
Where Vessyll sees an opportunity is in the middle tier — bigger than Tesla’s residential Powerwall but smaller than utility-scale systems — in a niche that includes commercial and industrial customers, as well as some larger residential uses.
“Vessyll is ahead of the curve [for a sector] that will grow exponentially, and they have an absolute chance to be a player in it,” said Nina Axelson, president of Grid Catalyst, the Twin Cities-based startup incubator that selected Vessyll this spring as part of its first cohort.
Adam previously worked as a senior project manager in Tesla’s battery division, where he became a student of the technology. His experience there led him and Zahra to try to design an easy-to-use battery system that wouldn’t require much work by contractors to install or set up.
The result is the Vessyll, which holds up to 46.5 kilowatt-hours of power, more than three times the storage of Tesla’s Powerwall. Tesla discontinued its mid-sized Powerpack product last year and now focuses on smaller residential systems and larger utility systems.
“Vessyll is a plug-and-play device that holds more power than other batteries” that target the commercial and residential markets, he said. “We’ve also developed what we call our ‘secret sauce,’ which is the energy management system built into the battery.”
Initially, Adam and Zahra had no preference for the type of battery technology. However, after speaking with scientists and other experts, they chose lithium iron phosphate technology because it uses a water electrolyte that is less prone to fire risk than the chemical electrolyte found in lithium-ion, Zahra said.
The couple also liked that the technology has been around for years and costs less than lithium-ion batteries because it requires significantly less nickel and cobalt. One downside is that it is less energy dense and requires more physical space than lithium-ion technology.
Adam hopes Vessyll could someday tap Minnesota’s iron ore industry for materials, which he said operates in a much better regulatory environment than other countries. “We’re trying to stay away from child labor and African mining,” he said.