Electric vehicle charging software provider WeaveGrid has started a yearlong accelerator journey as a member of Cohort X, the latest group of companies backed by the nonprofit Elemental Excelerator.

WeaveGrid will select a utility in either California or Hawaii to deploy an EV charging project as part of the accelerator program, founder and CEO Apoorv Bhargava told NetZero Insider.

Elemental’s program offers a “great opportunity for us to start building relationships across both of these states with some of the regulated utilities,” Bhargava said. In addition, Elemental provides mentor pairing and investor matching sessions.

“As far as accelerators go, they are probably top of the line in the fact that they have immense connections to venture capitalists,” he said.

The new cohort is the 10th group to earn a place in Elemental’s program. Elemental started as a Hawaii-based accelerator and later opened an office in California after partnering with Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.

Cohort X has 19 members across the sectors of circular economy, clean water, decarbonized mobility, clean energy, and food and land systems.

Elemental’s program takes a tracked approach, Bhargava said. It recognizes that companies have different business issues that they are facing when they enter the cohort.

“Not all of us are going through the same de-risking moments,” Bhargava said.

WeaveGrid is in a track that funds companies to deploy a project, and they have access to Elemental’s network of companies for their projects.

“The project involves doing something that scales your technology and your solution in a massive, multiplicative way, or what they call the 10x factor,” he said, adding that the project also must have deep community engagement.

WeaveGrid’s software solution enables large-scale integration of EVs onto the grid, according to Bhargava.

“At our core, we have a software platform that works to provide utilities visibility, some amount of predictability and also control through managed charging,” he said.

Bhargava describes the company’s approach as “continuous multivariable optimization,” which allows it to “optimize charging to solve for the full system costs and benefits.”

WeaveGrid does not consider EVs as distributed energy resources. “There’s a tendency to lump all things that don’t look like a power plant into the DER category, and we believe that because people buy EVs first and foremost for the mobility value, they are not the same as any other DER,” Bhargava said.

The company, he said, thinks about the entire lifecycle of a person’s driving and charging experience to optimize the charging element to meet the needs of the driver and the utility.

“Utilities are really waking up to this and starting to innovate quite a bit in the space,” he said.

Xcel Pilot

WeaveGrid is in an active pilot project with Xcel Energy (NASDAQ:XEL) as part of the utility’s Charging Perks program for Colorado EV owners.

Xcel has a goal of powering 1.5 million EVs in the eight states it serves by 2030, according to Nadia El Mallakh, area vice president of strategic partnerships and ventures at Xcel.

Charging Perks “is about making it easy for drivers to use smart charging, and it rewards them for charging their car at optimal times,” she told NetZero Insider. The program encourages customers to charge up during off-peak hours, which is mostly evenings and overnight, when Xcel has abundant renewables on its system.

Customers receive $100/year for participating, and El Mallakh says Xcel expects to run the pilot for two years. It launched the pilot for Telsa drivers in June and then to other EV brands in September.

“This is one of the first smart-charging pilots in the country between an energy provider and multiple non-Tesla automakers,” she said. “Tesla drivers can also participate in the pilot through evPulse, the EV charging optimization platform from WeaveGrid.”

The utility has a target to enroll 600 customers in Colorado, and El Mallakh says 150 had signed up by the beginning of October. Data from the pilot will inform Xcel’s decision on whether to launch the charging program in some or all of its service territory.

“Our customers are our North Star to see if this is working well for them and if it’s useful for the electric grid,” she said.