What inspired you to found Meltek?
I grew up around utilities. My grandfather spent his career at Detroit Edison, and my father worked for many years at Entergy, most recently in grid modernization. I've seen the industry's major trends over the years, from the shift to renewable energy and distributed energy resources to advanced meter infrastructure. The grid is becoming increasingly dynamic, but utilities can be relatively slow to change or innovate. After I received my MBA from the University of Rochester, I started working with my father. We set up Meltek together to help utilities innovate with new grid flexibility programs and accelerate the energy transition, facilitating more renewable energy in the grid.
What are some of your goals for Meltek?
Our overarching goal is to create as much value as possible for our users and utility partners through improved product features and functionality and access to the wholesale markets. Additionally, we plan to expand geographically to work with more customers and utility partners across the United States and, down the road, internationally.
What are your goals for the different departments of Meltek?
This has been a busy year at Meltek, and we’re proud to have significantly improved our User Experience. We now offer some of the fastest rewards in the industry via our new QuickPayConnect feature and have built integrations with EVs, EV chargers, smart thermostats, and energy data (and soon more granular carbon emissions data). We continue to improve the scope and depth of our back-end systems and increase operational efficiency.
On the marketing side, we strive to find the optimal way to communicate with our users, understand what they want, and attract more users to the platform.
What’s one interesting thing people should know about you?
In an undergrad communication studies class, I won the award for the most creative presentation for a play in which I acted out the history of the world as taught by a robot teacher to her robot students in the year 3000.