What is the name of your organization?
Beacon Climate Innovations
What is the name of your solution?
The Beacosystem Energy Toolkit
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A toolkit of synergistic, crowd-sourced “navigational aids” for communities to optimize their energy transition journey.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Somerville, MA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Across the United States, municipalities are flying blindly into the energy transition.
They are facing severe challenges around load growth and deteriorating electrical grids. At the same time, they are missing significant opportunities to gain agency over their energy destiny and support local economic development. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are one of the most effective tools to ensure sufficient, reliable energy for communities. However, especially for underserved communities, actually building DERs can be an insurmountable challenge for the following reasons:
Fragmented Decision-Making – Without an integrated approach, planning remains siloed and inefficient, slowing the transition.
Workforce Shortages – Even when projects are approved, municipalities struggle to find skilled labor to execute them.
Limited Access to Funding & Technology Partners – Many Environmental Justice (EJ) communities lack the necessary resources to secure and deploy climate-tech solutions effectively.
Without structured intelligence and execution support, energy resilience projects fail to get off the ground, leaving communities vulnerable to the negative effects of extreme weather events, rising energy prices, and deteriorating grids.
What is your solution?
Beacon Climate Innovation’s Beaco-system is a self-catalyzing three-pronged solution designed to aid communities in the development of a Distributed Energy Resource strategy and successfully execute their DER projects. The three prongs are as follows:
CEERUM: A scenario-planning software with which communities can understand the financial, energy and carbon impacts of different climate projects and initiatives.
RE&IC (Renewable Energy & Innovation Consortium): A consortium of climate tech firms, solution providers, and project partners based out of Greentown Labs.
ALIGN: A workforce development program designed to train local community MWBEs to build DERs.
A typical path with the Beaco-system begins with CEERUM and the development of a strategy to build DERs. Once a strategy has come into focus, communities work with RE&IC to find a technical partner capable of spearheading and designing the project. Finally, the community would work with ALIGN to develop their on-the-ground workforce to build and provide continuing support to the DERs.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The Beaco-system was designed with small-to-midsized municipalities in mind, especially those municipalities who don’t have the resources to pay for expensive big-data solutions or long-term consultants. In the face of deteriorating grids and load growth, and without a defined climate resiliency strategy, many municipalities are left vulnerable to power outages and all of the property damage and lost income that comes with them. While solutions exist to define and execute climate resiliency strategies on the federal and state level, those solutions are out of reach for municipal governments. BCI, through its technologies and deep ecosystem strength, can provide a path to climate resilience and Distributed Energy Resources at a fraction of the costs of its competitors, making it accessible to underserved municipalities across the nation, starting with Massachusetts.