Dylan Helkey
Sulphia Iqbal
Ziqing Zhu
Kaushal Kallam
Rutgers Business School
Jeana Wirtenberg
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RePowered Inc. is a renewable energy company founded with the purpose of project development engineering and project management. When clients would like to establish power plants or develop energy efficiency projects, RePowered Inc provides innovative engineering and technology integration services and assists in examining, analyzing, and interpreting the key parameters that need to be known.
RePowered Inc is an innovation founded by a group of renewable energy engineers, headed by Siddika Pasi. It was founded with the intention to provide the necessary understanding and knowledge to power plant developers in the energy industry. Some specific services her company provides are looking at energy sites, examining the quality of the site, and site due diligence. The company works mostly remotely as of right now but is seeking to open up an office branch in central New Jersey. RePowered Inc aids in locating, evaluating, and preparing sites for power plant development.
The overall vision statement of the company is to promote more clean energy across not only the United States of America but also the rest of the world. RePowered Inc specifically targets the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #7 of affordable, efficient, and clean renewable energy. Ms. Pasi was involved with the innovation, and she developed her company by expanding upon her previous jobs and occupations. Her team has collective industry experience that enables them to provide optimized and engineered solutions.
RePowered Inc had worked with different companies to validate emerging smart grid concepts using distributed energy (DER) and blockchain. RePowered Inc. is approached by independent businesses and developers. It is up to Ms. Pasi to communicate their expertise and convince these businesses to avail themselves of their services. Even though RePowered Inc. is not a publicly-traded company, it does have private investors, and each project receives its own funding.
Ms. Pasi had been working in the renewable energy industry for about 15 years. She saw the innovation and impact that renewable energy was having on the world around her. She told us “I was really blessed enough to be in the solar energy industry early on," and thus she got a chance to learn a lot of different things from working for a big corporation called First Solar. At the time she joined, the company was building utility-scale power plants using solar panels which provide an opportunity for her to learn industry knowledge.
When the company decided to transform from a power plant company to an equipment company, she realized that she had the skillsets needed to support other developers in working on developing utility-scale power plants. Besides, the urging of two of her mentors from First Solar told her that her skillsets were really needed in the market. Therefore, she decided to spin off on her own and start her own business. She told us “I’m really passionate about having a woman-owned business.” She had been working with different development companies, and they appreciate the set of unique skills she brings to the table.
The overriding purpose of the innovation for her is to influence the energy industry based on her skills and insights. She said, “I really want to make an impact on the renewable energy industry on the technical side, and that’s my motivation.” Her work experiences, industry knowledge, skillsets, mentors' suggestion, and passion are the factors that inspire her to do the innovation.
The most immediate beneficiaries of the work done by RePowered Inc are the individual companies that choose to hire RPI talent for their projects. By opting to contract RPI instead of developing a business plan independently, energy companies are benefiting from tried and true services RPI offers, such as geotechnical design support, risk mediation, and governmental compliance.
In addition to companies starting brand new projects, RPI partners with companies with existing renewable energy projects and monitors the carbon offset in order to turn those projects into carbon and renewable energy credits that can count toward state and federal decarbonization mandates. RePowered Inc is taking the guesswork out of creating a business out of renewable energy.
Given that they deal in strictly renewable energy, RePowered Inc makes a quantifiable impact on carbon dioxide emissions with every power plant they help initiate. By replacing a traditional power plant with a solar power plant, RePowered Inc will offset on average 520 metric tons of CO2 emissions. That amount of CO2 is the equivalent of 574,352 pounds of coal burned or 58,413 gallons of gasoline. These numbers are only getting more impressive as time passes and the technology developed by RPI progresses. The advancement of RPI energy storage technology is what will drive their growth, allowing for RPI to participate in larger projects.
This is all especially exciting given the current expansion of the solar industry. Pasi estimates that the market segment of solar plants RPI operates within has a market capitalization of $10 billion, and is expected to grow to $100 billion by the year 2030. The expected industry growth is what has allowed Pasi to seek out necessary investor financing, since investors are seeking green energy investment vehicles. Ms. Pasi is well versed in various forms of renewable energy, but by focusing the services of RPI on solar energy, the company is able to capitalize on the fastest growing renewable energy source in the world.
Diversity is at the heart of RePowered Inc’s values and principles as a company. Ms. Pasi is a hijab-wearing South Asian woman herself, and part of her goal as a leader at the company has been recruiting employees with diverse backgrounds and skillsets. She is passionate about bringing more young women and minority voices into the energy industry. She is willing to develop talent and provide opportunities that she has to young people and build a multicultural company that can provide services with more diverse voices.
As a Rutgers alumnus, one way she has been able to build a diverse workforce at RePowered Inc has been through reaching out to the EOF program at the Rutgers School of Engineering to hire interns. The EOF program at Rutgers University is a program for students who come from families or backgrounds who haven’t had many academic opportunities here in the United States. As the first person in her family to get an education in the United States, Ms. Pasi was a member of this program and has been able to connect with her juniors in the program.
Another way Ms. Pasi has cultivated her diverse workforce is through organically reaching out to some of the women engineers she has either worked with over the years as an engineer at some of the top green energy companies or met at events held by organizations like the Society of Women Engineers. This has contributed to the impressively large percentage of women working in RePowered Inc, as seen on the company’s public website. Ms. Pasi also notes that she is ambitious about the future of RePowered’s diversity, and she hopes to continue to bring in people with new and fresh perspectives to bring the company to even greater heights, and she also told us that she believed the diversity contributed to the robustness of her team.
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