As an engineer, Casimir Sienkiewicz has worked on mouse-like user controls for implantable sleep apnea devices, military-grade radio casings designed to work in war zones and heart pump rotors no bigger than your fingernail.
His engineering firm, Caztek, brought a bit of all three design standards to its newest prototype — the GridPak, a rolling, solar-powered electrical generator designed, developed and manufactured in downtown St. Paul.
Equipped with some 4,000 pounds of lithium batteries and measuring 18 feet in length, the boat-sized generator and its moving solar array can be taken into rugged, off-road terrain to power anything from a disaster relief effort to a golf tournament or outdoor music fair through the power of the sun. Caztek created GridPak for Trystar, a Faribault-based power distribution company better known for producing box panels, transformers and industrial cables.
“If you’re consuming what you’re generating off the solar array … you’re charged up,” said Sienkiewicz, standing with his back to the downtown St. Paul skyline and the Mississippi River in a parking lot off Robert Street. Sunbathing in front of him was prototype unit TS120-001, its solar panels rotating toward the sun with a push of its touchscreen from lead engineer Brett Neubauer.
That’s “TS” as in Trystar, “120” as in 120 kilowatts of energy storage, and “001” as in it’s the first of what’s expected to be many more to come.
Rapidly deployable
Sienkiewicz bills GridPak as the first rapidly deployable, zero-carbon-emission portable generator with industrial-grade battery capacity.
In other words, it’s big, it’s solar, it stores a lot of power and it rolls. It’s also noiseless, odorless and connected to the data cloud by touchscreen, making it about as far removed from a roaring, smelly, diesel-powered portable generator as a smartphone is to a walkie-talkie. It can even track energy use over time.
The two companies’ inaugural collaboration has produced the first of what’s hoped to be an industry-leading reworking of portable energy, and one of the physically largest items in either firm’s portfolio. Trystar estimates one GridPak could save an estimated 98 gallons of diesel fuel per week, or more than 5,000 gallons annually.
“You can obviously see the solar (array), but inside there’s the battery energy storage laid down into the body of the chassis,” said Tim McCarthy, marketing director with Trystar. “It’s quiet and it’s clean.”
GridPak, which stores up to 120 kilowatt hours of energy, can output some 30,000 watts of continuous, instantaneous power drawn and recharged exclusively from the sun. That’s enough juice to power a house, if not several homes, though the end user is expected to be a commercial-industrial buyer, like a major sporting event or a construction field office in a development site that has yet to connect to the electric grid.
In a pinch, three sizable tanks of liquid propane stored inside one of GridPak’s panels can provide emergency back-up power. For an especially large event or relief operation, four GridPaks could be chained together.
‘Inventors and problem solvers’
Caztek, once based in the Allen Building on Seventh Street in St. Paul’s Lowertown, moved about five years ago to Pine Street and University Avenue, not far from the St. Paul Police Department and the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center. The Pine Street location offers more product development space, but Sienkiewicz is already eying opportunities for expansion into neighboring properties.
Sienkiewicz said he and his firm of about 15 engineers, electricians and other “inventors and problem solvers” are launching about 10 products annually by offering industries “a fresh set of eyes” on old technology, like portable diesel generators that could use a tech refresh.
McCarthy, a former director of product management with Honeywell, said government and society are both increasingly insistent that private industries reduce their carbon emissions, and the federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offered “quite a bit of incentives” to comply.
Trystar, which was established in 1992 and maintains locations in Faribault, Burnsville, Detroit and Houston, will continue manufacturing GridPaks from Minnesota. Weighing some 15,000 pounds and equipped with multiple outriggers to steady it against winds of up to 50 miles per hour, the GridPak isn’t likely to hit everyday consumer retail markets anytime soon. McCarthy wouldn’t name a sales price, other than to say it’s in the “hundreds of thousands; it’s not $1 million.”
With prototype 001 up and running, McCarthy said he expects more GridPaks to roll out to commercial-industrial buyers in 2023.
“We’re working with customers on production planning,” he said.
