Every energy entrepreneur has an origin tale, but Alex Bazhinov’s is unusual.
When he decided to quit mining and pursue clean energy, he had to take much bigger steps than most company founders.
It wasn’t just a matter of finding the right business plan and financing. He had to find a new country. “I found myself living in a country where renewable energy was not an industry.”
Here’s the story about his move from Russia to the US and the eventual founding of Lumin, a smart panel company in Charlottesville, Virginia, that aims to make clean energy easier for everyone.
“We as people, we as humans, we need electrification to happen rapidly and at scale. And all products that enable electrification have to be extremely affordable. Because it is really not about a trophy home with a beautiful electric vehicle in front and solar panels and all that. It is about the mass middle America getting electrified. This is where scale is. This is where the impact is,” he said in the Energy Changemakers podcast, An Entrepreneur’s Journey from Russia and Oil to the US and Clean Energy: Lumin.
Follow the Energy Changemakers Podcast
While much of his story is unusual, it strikes familiar chords too. His “Ah ha” moment led him to the common refuge of many entrepreneurs — his garage. There he developed his first smart panel prototype, a task that wasn’t easy, given that his training is in finance and business, not engineering.
“I had my day job, our second child was just born…and at night I would go down to my garage,” he said “I’m not an engineer by training, by education, nor by experience, so I just had to learn a lot. I read, and I watched YouTube videos. I learned what is an electrical circuit, how to build it, how does a sensor work, how does a relay work, how to write basic software code to make those things work together.”
Bazhinov incorporated Lumin in 2016, and last year global tech giant ABB led a strategic investment in the company with participation from Lumin’s primary institutional investor, Carbon Drawdown Collective, and its other incumbent investors. And earlier this year, Sunnova began integrating the Lumin Smart Panel into its adaptive home offering, which combines solar power, battery storage, and smart energy management.
In this interview, Bazhinov explains how the once-boring smart panel is becoming pivotal to driving down costs and increasing efficiency as we electrify buildings and transportation.
The full podcast is available to all listeners. (Transcripts are available to Energy Changemakers community members.)
