April 12th, 2021 — The past two decades have seen a revolution in energy access, with over a billion people gaining access to electricity worldwide. However, electricity grids in many emerging economies remain incomplete and unreliable, driving millions of people to supplement the grid with costly and carbon-intensive diesel generators.
While cleaner distributed energy resources (DERs) like solar and storage promise to provide reliable carbon-free power, it remains difficult for individual buildings and businesses in emerging markets to efficiently manage and integrate DERs.
SHYFT Power Solutions’ energy management platform enables businesses and energy providers to seamlessly optimize the performance and operational efficiency of distributed energy resources. With an initial focus on Nigeria, SHYFT’s machine learning technology enables smart control of hybrid power systems while automatically integrating them with unreliable, centralized power grids.
Decentralized Electricity Is Already Here - But It’s Dirty
In Nigeria, which is projected to become the world’s third most populous country by 2050, nearly half of the population does not have access to grid electricity, while those with access face regular power cuts. The cumulative impact of power shortages in Nigeria amounts to $28B annually, equivalent to 2% of Nigeria’s GDP.
Intermittent power coupled with rapid economic and population growth has led burgeoning energy consumers to supplement energy needs independently via onsite generation. Today, Nigerian homes and businesses rely on over 60 million generators and spend over $14B annually to power them, resulting in high levels of pollution that affect millions of Nigerians every day.
While increasingly cheap solar and storage systems provide an attractive alternative to unreliable grid power and expensive diesel generators, managing and integrating DERs in emerging markets remains difficult. Most homes and businesses do not have the expertise or capacity to manually manage hybrid power systems, and it remains difficult to optimize these systems in coordination with grid intermittency.
By digitizing and managing distributed energy assets, SHYFT is leapfrogging unreliable centralized grids (and dirty decentralized energy) to unlock cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable power for hundreds of millions of potential customers in Nigeria and beyond.
How SHYFT Simplifies Clean, Distributed Energy
SHYFT’s energy management platform automates the complex and expensive process of optimizing resources across hybrid power systems. For businesses connected to multiple power sources—like rooftop solar, a centralized grid, batteries, fuel tanks, or generators—SHYFT’s platform monitors and optimizes the performance of each source using advanced analytics and machine learning.
Through a vertically integrated approach that incorporates IoT, firmware, and software solutions, SHYFT’s platform controls every aspect of the optimization process to deliver immediate benefits to customers. This end-to-end approach enables the company to achieve over 99% data reliability, significantly higher than industry competitors.
SHYFT serves a wide spectrum of customers, from small businesses to larger commercial and industrial sites, across the Nigerian market. SHYFT customers have realized significant reductions in maintenance visits and energy costs, leading to a return on investment of up to 60%. In addition, the reliable electricity access that SHYFT enables has proven essential for key business customers; today, nearly every major Nigerian bank has begun integrating SHYFT’s platform into their commercial real estate portfolios.
SHYFT Raises Seed Round
In 2018, Powerhouse Ventures invested in SHYFT’s pre-seed round as our fund’s second investment. Over the past three years, SHYFT has transitioned from developing their product to establishing strategic partnerships with the largest backup power companies in Nigeria, representing $7M in potential revenue. Currently, SHYFT’s solutions are deployed across over 2 MW of distributed assets.
Today, SHYFT announced the close of their $3.1M seed round. SHYFT’s investors to date include Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures, Softbank Investment Advisors, Powerhouse Ventures, Urban Us Ventures, and LoftyInc. With this latest round of funding, SHYFT is poised to grow their operational capacity to meet the growing demands of Nigeria’s energy transition, including the integration of solar and storage into the country’s 5,000+ commercial bank branches.
We’re proud to work with SHYFT’s dedicated team, including Co-Founder & CEO Ugwem Eneyo and Co-Founder & CTO Cole Stites-Clayton, to build a decentralized and decarbonized energy future in Nigeria and emerging markets around the world.
Special thanks to Nick Curran and Ry Storey-Fisher.
To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.