At CEBIP, A Familiar Face With Another Bright Idea
Expert panel: In addition to cutting-edge energy-efficiency technology, Oyster Bay startup VoltAir Power is energized by a trio of brilliant and successful cofounders
FEBRUARY 24, 2022
By GREGORY ZELLER
Innovate LI
Turns out, you can go home again – at least, if you’re an energy-efficiency pioneer with cutting-edge technology, major-league partners and world-class ambitions.
Such is the case for Bonded Energy Solutions, a 2013 startup that has already graduated from Stony Brook University’s Clean Energy Business Incubator Program, and founder Jerritt Gluck, who isn’t done with CEBIP just yet.
Last September, BES – on a mission to introduce modern temperature-control technologies to centuries-old apartment buildings, and that’s just for starters – became the third client to officially graduate from the incubator program, following December 2020 graduate ThermoLift (also a tech-heavy heating/cooling innovator) and January 2021 graduate Re-Nuble (a “harvestable energy” trendsetter).
Now, after bringing flagship technologies SteamTech (designed to maximize the efficiency of old-school steam-boiler systems) and WatchIt (a real-time tank monitor that measures fuel-oil consumption and tracks deliveries to one-tenth of a gallon) to market, BES is back. Sort of.
Jerritt Gluck: Go team
Gluck’s startup has joined with Kinetic Services Engineering of upstate Wayne County and Valley Stream-based Emes Solar to form VoltAir Power, an Oyster Bay shop aiming to provide “cost-free air conditioning and domestic hot water” by powering state-of-the-art heating and cooling equipment with solar power.
All three partner companies still exist. In fact, BES – which earned an HVAC contractor license in 2020 and boasts a thriving Tele-Mechanics service that provides videocall consultations to non-mechanically inclined customers – is flying high.
But with VoltAir, BES aims even higher. The startup combines solid engineering, advanced tech and long experience to help property managers comply with changing environmental regulations and reduce energy expenditures, primarily through the seamless integration of solar power and “hydronic distribution” – the use of chilled fluid, usually water, as a heat-transfer medium.
And it’s taking a true team approach, noted CEO Gluck, “bringing C-suite talent to the table.”
The BES boss, with a “unique view of the world and the mechanical systems in it,” is the primary innovator, while Emes Solar CEO Marc Schmerler is VoltAir’s CFO – Gluck referenced his unique ability to apply energy tax credits across a project’s scope, legally and efficiently propelling clean-energy efforts that “might otherwise be non-executable.”
Kinetic Services Engineering Lead Engineer Joe Weinschreider, meanwhile, is a New York State licensed professional engineer and a Mechanical Electrical Plumbing Engineer – and as VoltAir’s director of engineering, rounds out an experienced and talented trio with complementary skills, according to Gluck.
“Not only do we develop products in the laboratory, we design and install,” the VoltAir CEO told Innovate Long Island. “We are a design-build one-stop shop.”
The experienced partners will face new challenges as parts of a single conglomerate – and to overcome them, will lean heavily on CEBIP’s commercialization resources.
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“We’re a more mature company than the typical CEBIP company,” Gluck noted. “We have products, we have sales, we have employees.
“But growth is difficult at any stage,” he added. “You have to recognize your talents as a company, and you have to understand your boundaries.
“There are a lot of ways to structure growth.”
Gluck’s familiarity with CEBIP’s managers and rigorous business-building gauntlet can only help. He credited the good guidance BES received as a CEBIP client, calling it “very important for any entrepreneur trying to figure out how to grow to the next level.”
“[CEBIP Executive Director David Hamilton] and his team have answers, which is key to helping companies like Bonded Energy,” Gluck said. “And it will be key to helping VoltAir take its patented technologies to a new level.”
But ultimately, VoltAir’s experience and technological prowess will carry the day, according to Gluck, who believes that “people pay for one of two things: more pleasure or getting rid of pain,” and says the startup “addresses the building owner’s latest pain.”
“In the world of buildings and heating and cooling and conditioned spaces, people pay to get rid of pain,” he said. “We’ve always been very successful at coming up with solutions that the market will pay for – but this new evolution is not just for Bonded Energy.
“It’s for all of New York, and the introduction of new technologies.”
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