CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 3, 2025 — Novele Chief Technology Officer Dr. Geng Niu took part in the MIT Energy Conference in Cambridge, Mass., where this year's program focused on moving energy technology from breakthrough to deployment.
Novele's case was about where electrical demand is created. A commercial building's primary cost of power and its draw on the grid are set by a small number of peak moments, and those moments are produced inside the building by equipment the building already controls. Demand charges, the part of a commercial electricity bill priced on the month's highest peak rather than on total consumption, are set in exactly those moments. Managing demand at that point is a different problem from adding generation or transmission upstream of it.
That matters for electrification. Heating, cooking and vehicle charging all raise peak demand in buildings whose electrical service was sized for a smaller set of loads. Where service capacity is the binding constraint, reshaping load inside the building can defer or avoid a service upgrade that would otherwise have to happen before the electrification work could begin.
Doing that well is as much a software problem as a hardware one. Novele's AI-enabled analysis tools model how a building's demand builds up over a billing period, and BoardOS, the control software on the installed system, uses that picture to decide when to charge, when to discharge, or when to perform other high-value energy actions. Most systems wait for load to cross a threshold, by which point the peak has already set the bill.
EnergyBoard was built for that job: an intelligent, wall-mounted battery installed inside the building, behind the utility meter, where the peak is created.
About Novele
Novele is an applied-AI company for energy in the built environment, making buildings intelligent with the hardware-enabled AI layer that lets them predict, reshape, and optimize their power in real time. EnergyBoard, its modular energy storage platform, is built for indoor installation in occupied commercial buildings, and BoardOS is the intelligence that orchestrates it across a single site or an entire portfolio.
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