Charles Murray was attending a Booth entrepreneurship class in 2016 when he met Lane Nelson, a fellow student with a background in finance. Murray, who previously worked for an energy storage company, was kicking the tires on a concept for a startup that could revolutionize the grid. He asked Nelson for help. The two put together a business plan and realized they had something special on their hands. With Nelson as CFO and Murray as CEO, soon, they were all in on Switched Source.
In 2017, soon after Nelson and Murray ideated the company, Switched Source placed second in the University of Chicago’s New Venture Challenge, the number one university accelerator in the country, and won funding from the University of Chicago’s Innovation Fund. That same year, Nelson was named a Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ in Energy winner. They were off and running.
The Technology
If you take a good look at your local power lines, you will likely see three wires strung across the top. All three wires (or “phases”) are used for larger customers that have heavy loads like fans, pumps and electric machinery, while more common, residential customers only use one of these wires for “single-phase” power.
Over time, different load pockets develop, and the electric utilities operating the system must decide how to divvy up the lines. The split can be uneven. As demand in each neighborhood fluctuates, some lines are under more strain than others. For example, when more people in a neighborhood buy electric vehicles (EVs) that they need to plug in to charge, they need more power during certain parts of the day. Or, if a cluster of homes install rooftop solar panels, they need less power on sunny days and more on cloudy days.
“It’s really difficult to maintain that balance across the three wires,” Murray said. “What ends up happening is there’s congestion or underutilized capacity in that backbone. And that’s what we’re solving for. We can unlock capacity from the existing infrastructure.”
Managing this power balance has historically been manually intensive, and can cause unnecessary outages for customers. Murray and Nelson are commercializing new technology to change that. The product that has caught the most attention, the Phase-EQ, is a device placed along a power line that autonomously redistributes traffic among the three wires. The device allows electric companies to more efficiently distribute power, increasing electric grid reliability, resilience and capacity.
With this technology in place, a grid is able to double solar and EV hosting capacity, and at less than 20 percent the cost of installing energy storage. The technology also makes the grid more nimble, able to react quickly to storms and other incidents that could cause massive power outages.
From Technology to the Marketplace
The Phase-EQ has caught the attention of electric companies and governments across the country. In 2023, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) awarded Switched Source with a $1 million grant to support development of the Phase-EQ as part of its Future Grid Challenge. Switched Source installed its first unit in Florida in 2024, and ten are now up and running, from Florida to Alaska. Now, thanks to two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grants, they’ll be producing and installing at a greater scale.
Switched Source won an award in the second round of the DOE’s 2024 Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program—established as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to allocate $10.5 billion to bolster the nation’s electrical grid—and the American Made Manufacture of Advanced Key Energy Infrastructure Technologies (MAKE IT) prize.
With the MAKE IT prize money, which aims to promote domestic manufacturing of energy technology, Switched Source was able to expand their facilities. The company moved from their 5,000 square foot warehouse to a 20,000 square foot production facility in Brighton Park, Chicago. The project expects to create more than 75 new jobs, as well as develop upskilling initiatives and enhance workforce development through partner collaborations. As the company fully equips their larger facility, they hope to speed up production from a new device per month to a new device every week.
“Much of our success as a company is due to the support of the brilliant people who have pushed us and our business plan, beginning with various pitches, business incubators and competitions in the early days of our company,” Nelson said.
With funding from the GRIP Program, Switched Source will deploy their Phase-EQ devices in Florida, a region at high risk of severe weather. Switched Source estimates the project will shorten outages by 10 percent on impacted circuits, save 300,000 MWh of energy per year, and reduce operational costs by $20 million over 20 years.
While Murray acknowledged the awards are a “huge milestone” for the business, he hesitated to celebrate too soon. The GRIP project is awarded, but is still in the planning stages.
“I like to celebrate when the equipment’s in the ground and it’s running,” he said. “Once we start turning the crank on these units, then it’ll feel real to me. It’s like the difference between booking the vacation and when the flight takes off.”
Learn more about Switched Source here.