Here is a fact about the electrical grid that is both boring and, once you notice it, slightly maddening: every time electricity changes between direct current and alternating current, some of it turns into heat and disappears. Enteligent, a small company in Morgan Hill, California, has built an entire business on refusing to let that happen more than it must.
The setup is almost too neat. A solar panel produces direct current. A lithium battery stores direct current. An electric vehicle charges on direct current. And yet, in a conventional installation, the power coming off your roof gets inverted to AC to travel through the building, then rectified back to DC to fill the car. Each round trip is a small tax. Enteligent's pitch is that if you keep the electricity in DC form the whole way - panel to battery to car - you can pocket the tax instead of paying it. The company says its bidirectional DC-to-DC charger recovers up to 25% of the electricity that traditional systems lose along the way.
That charger, unveiled at Intersolar North America in early 2023, was billed as the world's first solar-powered DC-to-DC bidirectional EV charger. It supplies up to 25 kilowatts of DC fast charging - roughly three times quicker than the AC Level 2 boxes bolted to most garage walls - and it works in two directions, so a parked car can push power back into a home or onto the grid when the grid is stressed. Bidirectional charging tends to get pitched as a feature. For Enteligent it is closer to a worldview: the car is not just a load, it is a battery on wheels.
The company was founded in 2021 by Sean Burke, who runs it as chief executive, and Bahman Sharifipour, its chief technology officer and a power-systems veteran whose career runs through Flex, Delta, and HP. Burke arrived from the LED-lighting world by way of stints at AMD Radeon, Nortek, and Flextronics. Between them they represent a specific kind of hardware pedigree - people who have spent careers worrying about where watts go and why - which is exactly the temperament a DC-to-DC company requires.
Enteligent's first product was not the charger at all but the NMax, a module-level power optimizer that bolts onto individual solar panels. It does two jobs at once, which is the part that makes installers pay attention. It provides rapid-shutdown capability, a safety requirement, while also reporting panel-level performance data over the power line - and the company says the optimization nets an average of about 10% more electricity out of a typical rooftop array. In an industry where a point of efficiency is money, ten of them is a sales pitch.
