⚡️ Spark - AI-powered workflows for large-scale clean energy development

😎 TL;DR

Spark is an AI-powered planning and workflow tool for large-scale clean energy developers that lets them break ground faster. Tae and Julia were previously engineering and product leaders at Tesla, Apple, and Brex.

We are trusted by award-winning solar and battery developers with nearly 1 GW of projects across the US. If you are a utility or community-scale developer, book a call with us to learn more.

🔌 The Problem

We are in the midst of a generational energy transition, with solar deployment expanding at an annualized rate of roughly $500B globally, and the Inflation Reduction Act unleashing another $400B in federal funding. To meet the soaring demand for clean energy, the US must build an equivalent amount of clean generation by 2035 to the total electricity supplied by all sources today.

Despite this rapid deployment, utility-scale clean energy developers often spend months assessing and preparing their projects for financing and construction due to varying policies, interconnection, and permitting requirements across jurisdictions. This pre-construction phase is an error-prone and manual effort of researching and aggregating data across thousands of PDFs, websites, and maps.

Many developers find themselves poring over 1000-page documents, engaging expensive consultants, or focusing on a limited number of jurisdictions.

Through hundreds of conversations with developers, we consistently hear that navigating this "complex patchwork of jurisdictions, where every state is a snowflake," is a major obstacle.

✨ Enter Spark

With Spark, developers can identify requirements, risks, and incentives by leveraging our curated dataset. They can now screen prospective projects in seconds, not weeks.

For the first time, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a dramatically simplified method to extract grid interconnection and permitting requirements, zoning ordinances, economics (rates, tax credits, RECs), and a range of unstructured information relevant to renewables development.

By refining the data specifically for this industry, Spark introduces a new way for developers to navigate through otherwise disparate and cumbersome information.

These insights are then precisely mapped to individual counties and parcels of land, accelerating the development process significantly.

However, Spark’s capabilities extend beyond location diligence and requirement aggregation. Our goal is to re-imagine the development workflow, enabling developers to drastically reduce the time dedicated to mundane tasks such as research, documentation, and portfolio management.

One of our customers, an industry veteran with nearly 20 years of experience, said “I see this tool as my Jarvis.”

Our mission is to empower developers to prioritize human interactions and make strategic decisions about where to invest millions of dollars to electrify the nation’s grid — not the manual, back office work.

🪄 The (Dream) Team

Tae built software while sitting inside the Model 3 factory at Tesla, wrote payment systems that processed millions in EV sales as a founding engineer at Lucid Motors’ commerce team, and helped Gen Z find love at Tinder.

Julia was an engineering manager on the team that automated fraud alerts and dispute filing at Brex. She also built search and cloud infrastructure at Apple and Microsoft and bankrolled her passion for crypto through hackathon prizes on nights and weekends.

Hailing from São Paulo, Brazil, where we lived ten minutes apart after our parents immigrated from Korea and China, we embarked on our American dream at 18 for undergraduate degrees in STEM at Georgia Tech and Brown University. Our paths crossed many years later in New York City, through a shared passion for software engineering, infrastructure for society, and startups.

⚡️ Energized yet?

Are you (or do you know) a developer of utility or community-scale solar/storage projects? Book a demo or reach out to founders@sparkhq.ai!