Profile • Energy • The Grid
Tim Heidel
He cools a power line to colder than Pluto and pushes ten times the electricity through it.
He cools a power line to colder than Pluto and pushes ten times the electricity through it.
Tim Heidel runs a company whose flagship product looks, from a distance, like nothing at all - a plain black pipe slung between ordinary towers. Inside is the interesting part: superconducting tape bathed in liquid nitrogen at -321F, carrying current with so little resistance that VEIR's lines can move five to ten times the power of conventional cables on roughly the same land.
That mundane-looking pipe is the answer to a question Heidel chased for the better part of a decade before he ever wrote a business plan. He kept reading the same conclusion in study after study: to cut emissions seriously, the world has to double or triple the size of its power grids. Then he looked at how grids were actually being built and found every indicator pointing the wrong way. Transmission was getting more expensive. Lines were taking longer to permit. The gap between what the models demanded and what utilities could deliver was widening, year after year.
"Transmission was getting more expensive over time and taking longer to build. We desperately need to find a new solution."
- Tim HeidelVEIR is that solution, or the bet that it can be. Founded in 2019, the Woburn, Massachusetts startup builds overhead high-temperature superconductor lines. Heidel joined as chief technology officer in 2020 and took over as chief executive in 2023, moving from the physics to the profit-and-loss. In June 2024 the company energized its first 100-foot test line. In January 2025 it closed an oversubscribed $75 million Series B led by Munich Re Ventures, with Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund, National Grid Partners, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and others piling in.
Grid engineering has a stubborn rule of thumb: if you want to move a lot of power, you crank up the voltage. High voltage is why transmission towers are tall and why the right-of-ways beneath them are wide. It is also why people fight them. Tall towers and wide corridors are, in Heidel's blunt phrasing, "deeply unpopular" - and unpopular infrastructure is slow infrastructure.
Superconductors let him invert the formula. Because the cable carries enormous current with almost no loss, VEIR can push the same high power at much lower voltage. Lower voltage means shorter structures, narrower corridors, and a line that picks fewer fights with the communities it crosses. The technology does not just make transmission better on a spreadsheet; it makes it easier to actually build, which is the part the spreadsheets kept missing.
"We can deploy the same high power but with a footprint and visual impact that is far less intrusive - and therefore can overcome a lot of the public opposition as well as siting and permitting barriers."
- Tim HeidelHeidel did not arrive at superconductors by accident. He collected four degrees from MIT - a bachelor's in 2005, a master's in 2006, a PhD in electrical engineering in 2010, and a master's in technology and policy along the way. Right out of his doctorate he served as research director for MIT's Future of the Electric Grid study, the kind of sweeping institutional report that maps where the system is headed and where it is going to break.
From there he went to ARPA-E, the Department of Energy's high-risk research arm, as a program director. He managed a portfolio of more than 75 projects worth over $150 million in federal funding across six programs, and launched the agency's SWITCHES and GRID DATA efforts - both aimed at the same nagging problem of how to control and optimize the movement of electric power. He later served as deputy chief scientist at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, then joined the investments team at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates' climate fund, where his job was to decide which technologies deserved a check.
It is an unusual resume for a founder: a person who spent years on the funding side, evaluating other people's grid ideas, before concluding the gap he kept seeing was worth filling himself. By the time he committed to VEIR, he had effectively pressure-tested the thesis from inside a research lab, a federal agency, a co-op association, and a venture fund.
"Just about every decarbonization study published in the last two decades concludes we're going to have to double or triple the scale of power grids around the world."
- Tim HeidelVEIR was conceived in a world worried about renewables and decarbonization. It is being commercialized in a world suddenly desperate to power AI data centers, which need staggering amounts of electricity delivered fast and in tight spaces. Heidel calls the data center business "highly dynamic, flexible, and bespoke," and the demand has pulled VEIR's roadmap forward. The same low-voltage, high-power line that was meant to unclog renewable corridors turns out to be well suited to feeding a hyperscale campus.
He is candid about the lessons. The biggest mistake, he has said, is failing to recognize that different contexts need different power-density solutions - that what a data center needs today is not what it will need in five years, which is not what the grid needs in twenty. And he has come to believe technical buyers do not want to be sold to; they want to design alongside you. VEIR's commercial approach leans on reference designs built with the customer's own engineers, peer to peer, rather than a pitch deck and a handshake.
The cooling, for all the drama of the number, is almost anticlimactic by design. Rather than running power-hungry refrigeration, VEIR lets the nitrogen evaporate to hold the cable cold - a passive trick that keeps the system simple and the energy overhead low. Simplicity, for hardware that has to sit outdoors and run for decades, is the whole game.
The numbers underneath the pitch keep climbing. VEIR's lines are designed to carry an initial transmission capacity of up to 400 megawatts, with future versions reaching into the gigawatts - all at conventional voltage levels and within the same corridor a utility already owns. That is the part Heidel keeps returning to in interviews: the technology is not asking the world to rebuild its rights-of-way or learn a new kind of tower. It slots into the system that exists, then carries far more through it. For a utility staring at years of permitting hearings, "the same footprint" is not a footnote. It is the whole sales pitch.
His advice to people entering the field reads like a summary of his own path. Learn the fundamentals of power, cooling and how data moves, he tells younger engineers, and be willing to chase opportunities on both the technical and the capital sides of the business. It is the rare counsel that someone has actually lived - Heidel spent time as a researcher, a federal program manager, a co-op scientist and a venture investor before he ran anything himself. Few founders show up to a hardware company having seen the problem from quite so many seats.
Strip away the cryogenics and the funding rounds and Heidel's ambition is plain: make it possible to expand the grid as fast as the climate math and the AI buildout both demand, without the permitting wars that have made transmission the slowest part of the energy transition. If the towers can be shorter and the corridors narrower, the lines get built. If the lines get built, everything downstream - renewables, data centers, electrification - has somewhere to flow.
It is a patient bet on unglamorous infrastructure, made by someone who spent fifteen years confirming the problem before deciding he was the one to solve it. The black pipe is supposed to be boring. That is the point.