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Perfectly Green Corporation launches innovative energy product in McKinney

Chris Beattie/Staff Photo - Perfectly Green Corporation CEO Eric Barger explains his company's technology Thursday at its ribbon-cutting launch in McKinney. The corporation will soon install units that combine energy sources to provide "perfectly green" power and electricity to area businesses.

Published: Friday, November 30, 2012 3:06 PM CST
What do you get when you put biomass, natural gas, waste vegetable oil, sun and wind all in one? A very effective energy source - seemingly a perfect one.


And that source is spreading its energy waves in McKinney. Perfectly Green Corporation unveiled its innovative technology this week.

"With sun or wind (powered energy) and those technologies, the problem is it's never running all the time," said John Monteiro, Perfectly Green chief operating officer. "What our unit does is blend all those different fuel sources so it's a constant flow of energy."


Outside interest in that blend peaked Thursday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, when city officials welcomed the corporation with open eyes and ears. Representatives from McKinney's Franconia Brewery, its first client, served beer as others admired the unit that in a few weeks will begin pumping "perfectly green" electricity through its facility.

Other energy sources, like those powered by sun or wind, rely on certain weather and times of day for efficiency. Depending on the building to which they're attached, Perfectly Green units will use a combination of sources and provide ever-steady, on-site energy.

Eric Barger, Perfectly Green co-founder and CEO, compared the unit to a "CPU of energy" that processes the sources at the same time and subsidizes them as they're needed on demand, as a computer processor does with different applications. "It's not just reuse or repurpose; we recycle, recover, redistribute pure energy," he said.

"All that is done with algorithms; it's all Internet-based," said John Buxbaum, the corporation's sales director. "Nobody's ever done it."

Which is what Barger and co-founder VJ Patel realized a few years after crossing paths. With Barger's background in the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) industry and Patel's engineering and IT experience, the soon-to-be visionaries started cranking out ideas on how to fix the inefficiencies in energy production happening all around, Patel said.

"I was still working at Southwest Airlines at the time, he was still doing HVAC contracting on the site, but we scraped together and got it going," Patel said. "I've always been about theory, building sophisticated machines, he's always been hands-on and tinkering, so together we had enough to pull this thing off in his garage."

As they perfected the concept, the McKinney Economic Development Corporation gave them a monetary push through its emerging technologies fund, and Perfectly Green spent the past four years doing research and development.

"This is the type of project that we are really looking for in McKinney as we bring new companies to our city," Mayor Brian Loughmiller said Thursday, mentioning recent accolades the city's received from Forbes and Money Magazine. "The reason we get that type of recognition is we have companies like Perfectly Green Corporation who are also state of the art, and they're bringing new technologies not just to McKinney, but to the world."

The first commercial unit will operate at Franconia Brewery, which will use it for a supplemental power source. After piping is put in, it will take just a couple of hours to install the Intelligent Energy Allocation (IEA) unit that will blend solar PV with waste vegetable oil to make electricity. Perfectly Green is building a car port for parking topped with solar PV to work with the unit.

"It's kind of hard to make a generating system sexy, but we were able to pull it off," Barger said.

Perfectly Green covers the equipment and installation costs, and in return, users like Franconia sign a power purchase agreement, through which they'll pay Perfectly Green up to 20 percent less than the market price for power. "Our goal is to provide supplemental power at a discounted rate, saving the business money," Monteiro said.

Perfectly Green plans to expand as it continues its partnership with the city. It hopes to install similar units in city facilities. Monteiro said the corporation and MEDC have discussed eventually building a central manufacturing and assembly plant to keep the jobs in McKinney.

All in one unit and, for now, in one city - a perfect fit.

"We're ready to go," Patel said. "We've done enough tinkering. It's time to start deploying them in mass quantities."

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