A Little Background on Why Exro was Founded and by Who...
The Man Redefining Electric Energy Production Before Ritchey founded the Company looking to disrupt global energy markets, he was a food scientist.
Although he always had a passion for applied physics and inventing, it was almost by accident Ritchey came up with the novel idea behind EXRO Technologies.
The story began one night when Ritchey and his family were staying at a cabin. The cabin was off-grid and powered by a generator.
Ritchey noticed that the generator was making a lot of noise throughout the night while the rest of his family slept, so he went outside to see if there was some way to turn it down.
He thought if the generator was producing less power, it would make less noise as well.
But Ritchey was surprised to find that there was no way to turn it down. The generator ran on one setting, no matter what.
He found that odd.
Why couldn’t the speed of the generator be adjusted?
Ritchey began researching and quickly discovered that all generators must run on one precise speed to produce electricity efficiently. This is just as true for a small domestic backup generator as it is for a power plant’s industrial turbines.
This is how generators had been produced for nearly 200 years. No one questioned it or tried anything different.
Until Jonathan Ritchey did.
His first Dynamic Power Management (DPM) prototype was simple.
He began designing a small generator that, unlike the generators up until that point, did not use a simple copper coil.
Ritchey created many individual coils—and constructed a mechanism that could shift their placement. This was his first take on a generator with multiple configurations, each designed to maximize efficiency for a particular speed range of the turbine.
Once Ritchey had a functioning model, he took his designs to a local clean technology institutional fund called Chrysalix. The people at Chrysalix liked his prototype and gave him some money to build a better version and provide proof of concept.
Ritchey used the cash to build a company that would eventually become EXRO.