Episode 167 | Breaker Breakthrough | Atom Power
In 2016, I had just moved to Charlotte, was in a rut professionally, and looking to make a change. That summer, I was first introduced to my guest, Atom Power CEO Ryan Kennedy. They had prototyped a solid-state circuit breaker called the “Atom Switch.” I wrote a handwritten letter thanking Ryan for his time. A few weeks later he asked me to help him manage their UL certification process.
“That was definitely one of the hardest things we probably ever went through,” says Ryan. What lay ahead of the company was several more years of testing and refinement. Atom Power achieved UL certification in 2019.
The Atom Switch uses silicon carbide chips, not mechanical switches, to cut current. Ryan says this gives breakers the added functionality of visibility and control to all the devices that come after that breaker, like EV charging, HVAC, or lighting.
From the outside, Atom Power is laser-focused on EV charging, which was not part of the discussion back in 2016. I remember sitting with Ryan back then, asking what sector would be best to enter first. We both agreed that one sector would be best. Six years later, Ryan has built on that idea, positing that the key is not choosing what sector to enter, but having the right sector reveal itself once the platform is in place.
“Create the platform that allows you to then go pick the market,” he says. Ryan admits the company was approached by many sectors asking to do pilot projects. Some sectors, like data centers, proved to be simply too big and diverse for a company as young as they were. With EV charging, he says, the Atom Switch was able to address a specific “pain point,” and the application was as “repeatable as possible.”
At the same time, Ryan admits the company has to “live in two worlds,” with an eye on the next sector. He says the key to that is optimizing features on the Atom Switch that enable the company to expand to those sectors more easily.
Ryan’s story was one that fascinated me when I first met him. He didn’t invent the Atom Switch in grad school. Straight out of high school, he worked as an electrician. Two weeks into the job, he was hit with an arc flash.
“That at least gave me room to think, I kind of thought technology was further along,” he says. Six years later he enrolled at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte, and earned his degree in electrical engineering. It was during this time, that both of those experiences helped him develop some “theories of the future that there needed to be a universal device to offer safe protection, visibility, and control at the edge of the grid.”
The company has moved on from those early days, when “we were largely treating nickels like manhole covers,” jokes Ryan.
“Breakers today, it’s cliched to say that no one thinks about them,” he says, but adds, “Your market is absolutely goliath.”
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