Energy transition | A Montreal company raises 70 million

dcbel raises $70 million in a financing round involving Quebec investors.

Dcbel has designed a residential two-way energy station to charge an electric car and then redirect the electricity from the vehicle’s battery to the house as needed or even sell the energy back to a utility company.

The dcbel station allows homeowners to use energy sources like solar panels, stationary batteries and electric cars.

The financing round was led by Idealist Capital, a Montreal-based investment firm focused on energy transition and clean technologies, which is providing approximately 50% of the total amount.

Investissement Québec and other investors are also participating in the round of financing which, according to our information, values ​​dcbel at more than 170 million Canadian dollars.

Objective: deployment

dcbel CEO and founder Marc-André Forget says the company is set to roll out the first-ever certified two-way residential electric car charger. The funding will be used to increase delivery capacity, he says, to accelerate the product’s rollout in “target territories,” starting with California, Texas and Florida, where energy prices are high. .

France, England and Canada will follow. “Our energy is relatively cheap in Quebec,” says Marc-André Forget. “We don’t necessarily have the problem of repeated blackouts like in California or Texas, where energy prices are ridiculous,” he says.

“In Quebec, we are lucky, we pay between 9 and 10 cents/kWh and there is no dynamic pricing. It is all you can eat. It’s the Chinese electricity buffet and what’s more, we’re 100% renewable and 99% carbon-free. It’s extraordinary,” adds the electrical engineer by training.

“In California, nonetheless, during off-peak hours – excluding dinner – citizens pay 16 cents/kWh. But between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., the rate rises to 61 cents/kWh. It’s six times more than here. »

A “smart” station

Unlike in Quebec, the 48-year-old entrepreneur emphasizes that the energy market is not a state monopoly in Texas, for example.

There, you can subscribe to an energy provider like you do to an internet provider, he says. “Prices vary according to the time and sometimes the temperature. This is where our residential energy station makes the difference. »

He explains that the dcbel station is smart and learns to recognize when its owner uses energy, when his car comes home and how the vehicle is used in order to find a way to power the house and s to ensure that the car will always have the right amount of energy, at the lowest possible price and in the most carbon-free way possible.

Marc-André Forget adds that the product even tells its user what performance he would get if he installed solar panels and a residential battery.

“If you live in a place where the cost of energy at dinner is very expensive while you accumulate surplus solar energy at noon, it becomes interesting to store the energy and use it at dinner instead to buy it from the power grid. »

One stop solution

While a dcbel unit sells for around US$5,000, Marc-André Forget says the competition is more expensive, less powerful, and doesn’t offer a “smart” product, and that dcbel is set to launch a more affordable product in a few month.

The system becomes particularly interesting at a time when power outages are likely to increase due to extreme events caused by climate change, underlines Pierre Larochelle, co-partner and director of Idéaliste Capital.

“Dcbel has signed agreements with Volvo and Nissan in particular, and could become a world leader, considering the advance and the unique solution (hardware/software) developed,” adds the man who is also chairman of the board of directors of Lion Electric.

“We will eventually have on the roads hundreds of millions of vehicles equipped with batteries with a fairly significant energy capacity. The key will be to find a way to use it to help manage energy demand at peak times,” says Pierre Larochelle.