Innovate by breaking the model.
We take the status quo products most relied upon and solve for what those solutions are missing. We will take a battery and turn it inside-out and upside-down to determine if it can last longer or be made smaller.
Real-time energy management
Leveraging science to solve the world’s energy problems.
At Apparent, we approach renewable energy from a different angle. Unlike other technology companies, we marry hands-on R&D with machine learning.
Below is a 2 MW array, 2 MWh of storage and a commercial load on a Novato feeder. The dispatch logic and the volt-var loop are running in your browser right now, on a fixed timestep, at the four-cycles-a-second cadence igOS is built around. It is not a video, and it is not a recording — the numbers are being computed as you read this.
Novato feeder · 2 MW PV · 2 MWh storage
11:16 · 0 cycles @ 4 Hz
- PV
- 1.76 MW
- Building
- 1.48 MW
- Battery
- -277.8 kW
- Inverter Q
- 592.3 kvar
- P
- 327 W
- Q
- -40.2 kvar
- |S|
- 40.2 kVA
- cos φ
- 0.008 lag
- φ
- -89.5°
- full scale
- 100.0 kVA
Dispatch Charging from surplus
52.1% SoC
Try it: switch reactive power support off. The building is a normal commercial load at 0.92 lagging, and its reactive draw pulls the feeder down through the line reactance until the voltage falls out of the shaded band — ANSI C84.1 Range A, the envelope a utility requires you to stay inside. Switch it back on and the inverter injects vars to hold the voltage up, while still charging the battery with the array’s surplus. Reactive power managed with active energy, which is the sentence the origin story ends on.
Why we are called Apparent
Two kinds of power. One name.
Apparent power is the term electrical engineers use for the whole of what a system carries: the active power that actually does work, and the reactive power that does none but without which the work could not happen at all.
They add as a complex quantity, not an arithmetic one — S = P + jQ — which is why the picture is a triangle and not a sum. The hypotenuse is what your conductors, transformers and switchgear are actually sized for.
The building shown here draws 900 kW of real power at 0.86 lagging. Its apparent power is over a megavolt-ampere. It pays for the difference in demand charges, in heat, and in equipment sized for current that never did a thing.
It’s very apparent why we chose our company name.
- P
- 900.0 kW
- Q
- -534.0 kvar
- |S|
- 1.05 MVA
- cos φ
- 0.860 lag
- φ
- -30.7°
900 kW real · 534 kvar absorbed · 1.05 MVA apparent
An unconventional way to see renewables.
Keep it simple.
By producing point solutions for specific needs, we know core function performance will be exceptional. With that in mind, we design products that work in harmony to solve complex comprehensive problems.
Do it for future generations.
A legacy isn’t just about material wealth, but also about the lasting influence and social impact on the world. By focusing our technological advancements on energy efficiency and sustainability, we aim for compatibility between business and planet.
Technology
A hardware stack, driven by a patented operating system.
igOS™
The brain of the platform.
A cloud-based, machine-learning energy platform that senses, analyses and acts on real-time grid data — bidirectionally, multiple times per second.
Learn moreREMI
Your on-site copilot.
The hardware-software interface in the electrical room. Solar, storage, generators, EV charging and building loads, orchestrated simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Learn morePULSE
Power Utilization Leveraging Surplus Energy.
The data-centre stack. Inline battery, waveform shaping and true grid isolation — so provisioned megawatts stop being wasted two-for-one.
Learn moreeXeL™
Hybrid Solar Water Heater.
Dedicated PV panels and a patented low-voltage DC heating assembly. About a quarter of a home energy bill, taken off the grid.
Learn moreWhere the demand is going
Data centres are the future.
In 2023, U.S. data centres consumed roughly 176 TWh of electricity — about 4.4% of total national consumption. With the growth of AI, that figure is expected to at least double by 2028, approaching 12%.
As demand surges, the operational challenges are magnified. Spikes in usage and the cooling needs of dense arrays mean higher expense, both in load management and in wear on costly components.
Our eXeL and igOS technologies lay the groundwork for the solution: a comprehensive hardware stack driven by a patented operating system, delivering cleaner power, less strain on parts, and real-time monitoring.
For perspective
One terawatt-hour is enough to power roughly 70,000 homes for a year. U.S. data centres used about 176 of them in 2023.