Executive summary:
Alex Bazhinov
- I spent almost ten years at the beginning of my career in mining and handled business with fossil fuels, coal, and anything excavated from underground. However, through my work, I saw firsthand how unsustainable everything was in the industry, which pushed me to consider clean energy resources and facilitate the clean energy transition.
- I attended the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia to obtain my Master of Business Administration degree (MBA). Unlike my classmates, whose goal was to build a career in larger companies, I wanted to start my own cleantech company. At Darden, the iLab Business Incubator provided a great launchpad and resources for startup ideas for UVA students and the broader Charlottesville community.
- During my time at Darden and before founding Lumin, I founded another startup, DreamPower. When I learned about the power purchase agreement model, I wanted to apply the concept of customers receiving a valuable service without any money down. At this startup, we provided small to medium-sized businesses with energy efficiency and upgraded their facilities with technologies such as LED lights, smart thermostats, and light motion sensors.
- After learning about how the energy grid operates and the latest trends in the energy world, I was motivated to explore the advancement of clean energy technologies since they have dramatically changed over the past ten years.
- After founding Lumin, I have led the company to grow from my garage to become the industry leader employing over 50 team members. While at Lumin, I was awarded two patents in the U.S. and five patents worldwide.
What is your field of expertise?
My expertise includes home energy management, distributed energy resources, grid edge, and the broader field of transactive energy in the cleantech industry. Quite counterintuitively, before Lumin, I spent many years in various senior finance positions in global mining firms. Through that experience, I witnessed the negative impact of fossil fuel production worldwide. From there, I entered the cleantech industry to align my passion for a global transition to clean, renewable, and abundant energy sources with my business interests.
Describe your journey to where you are today.
Before coming into cleantech, I was an executive in the mining industry. I moved to start DreamPower, which provided an energy-as-a-service platform for small and medium businesses. I learned about the trends and innovations happening at the edge of the grid. With my professional experience in both the fossil fuel and renewable energy industries, I have the knowledge to communicate with individuals and companies that have highly diverse backgrounds and experiences within the energy industry.My mission with Lumin is to provide a profitable and sustainable platform to contribute to the future of energy.
What does your company do, for whom, and how does it fit into the bigger picture of solving global issues with clean tech?
Lumin converts homes into personal microgrids balancing their energy supply and demand. Lumin’s hardware/software platform enables demand flexibility per circuit level in a home, interconnects various behind-the-meter distributed energy resources (such as solar PV, energy storage, and backup generator), and provides both the homeowner and the grid participants (utilities, wholesale market platforms, demand aggregators) with automatic home energy management. This is important because Lumin makes electrification of homes easy, ensures the best utilization of solar and energy storage, enables homeowners to save thousands of dollars yet makes their homes more resilient, and converts homes into assets for the grid.
What do you wish you could tell the younger you — what would’ve been incredibly helpful to you ten years ago?
Everything will work out.
LinkedIn: Alex Bazhinov