Carlton Cummins doesn’t mind being called a nerd. His face lights up with a gigatonne grin at the tag.
“I grew up interested in art but I knew I wanted to make stuff also. I would make accessories for my toys, then later I would get technical, making downhill go-karts, electric motorcycles and it grew from there.”
Carlton’s story is based between the Caribbean and Britain.
He and his partner in business Dr Amrit Chandan have been making global waves with their two-year-old company Aceleron founded in Britain.
They were featured on the prestigious list of Forbes 30 Under 30 (both are 28 years old) and they also got a TV appearance on BBC.
Cummins was born and raised in Vaucluse, St Thomas, while Amrit was born in Britain to parents originally from India.
Cummins is a proud past student of Sharon Primary and The St Michael School, and was a sixth former at Harrison College.
“HC was chosen because of my interest in art and design and the sciences. They allowed me to blend the dynamics of what I felt represented myself based on the field I wanted to go into career-wise.”
Industrial design and engineering piqued his interest after he left HC and so mechanical engineering satisfied the best of both worlds.
“You really get to understand how things are made, why they are made and how to improve. And you still get to work with the tangibles.”
A year at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, saw him transferring to St Augustine in Trinidad to do mechanical engineering, which he completed in three years.
“In my degree I followed my ethos of making things and so got excited when my final year project was to design a drivetrain for an electric motorcycle. I built it and tested it.”
This project sparked his excitement as he realised that he was going to need power to charge it, and so renewable energy became his new target.
“I thought hmm, what if I could put up solar panels and charge the vehicle that takes me around . . . . Or power my life entirely?”
So as soon as he graduated he went into the renewable energy field, working with Innogen from 2011 to 2014.
He left to study a master’s in sustainability in Britain at Brunel University with a thesis on waste management of electric vehicles and on consumer electronics. The light bulb moment came when he saw that the growing popularity of consumer electronics has produced an abundance of used lithium ion batteries, resulting in a huge waste management problem.
“I saw that we could reuse these batteries, cutting down on the waste, and transform them into something of value. Research showed that the batteries weren’t exactly waste . . . . They just were not valuable for their first application.”
He gave the example of taking “dead” batteries out of a remote and putting them into a clock that worked fine, seeing that the clock “didn’t need as much oomph”.
“That laptop battery could be repackaged with other batteries and make a replacement of another type of battery.”
Chandan and Cummins started Aceleron to reinvent these end-of-life batteries into low-cost, efficient energy storage for developing regions, solving two problems
at once.
The batteries are lead acid types and Aceleron is designed to take back the batteries and recycle them.
There are two stories on how the company started, based on who gave the story.
Cummins: “I met Chandan at my internship placement. It was a consultancy firm that recommended low emissions vehicles for companies. It was a six-month attachment and Amrit and I spent majority of our time talking about what was baby Aceleron at that stage, which was the problem, the opportunity, the market. It was like a dorm room business at that stage . . . just us two really hashing it out.”
To explore the business model they entered it into several student competitions to get expert feedback.
“We lost a lot and we learnt a lot. We entered over 30 competitions in all. We would lose and get the feedback and tweak. Go again. Get the feedback and tweak. Eventually we started to win.
“Suddenly we were on Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Europe January 2017, doing promotional work for Hyundai in Britain, Discovery Channel in conjunction with Casio and an appearance on BBC TV.
In outlining the timeline, Cummins stated that Aceleron’s first patent was field in 2015. In 2016 they started entering student competitions. By August 2016 the business was registered. In 2017 they won Shell Entrepreneurship Of The Year, the Innovate UK Grant (a government-backed grant to explore a new concept).
Cummins said the goal is to build better batteries worldwide. He is looking to launch Aceleron Caribbean, based in Barbados.
Aceleron is looking to change the relationship people have with batteries.
“Batteries will be built here with Bajans help. Kevin Simmons will be manning the ship in this space. The goal is for people to bring their end-of life battery to us, we refill it and send it back out.”
Cummins, who says he is “definitely hands-on” is excited about evolving the concept of where the Caribbean is.
“I want people to see that we can make things here that are just as good as anywhere else in the world.
“I am still building my own name and, fingers crossed, next year Barbados will be heavily involved in the energy sector.”
Chandan, 28, has a bachelor’s in chemistry and a doctorate in chemical engineering.
“Carlton and I met at the internship over lunch. So our conversations were lots of fun. From there we saw a real opportunity and started working on it as an after-school project.
“We entered into a few competitions and then in March of 2016 we left our jobs and by August 2016 it [Aceleron] was incorporated.”
Chandan said the key awards were a joy to win and picked out the one presented by her Royal Highness Princess Anne at the Royal College of Physicians as the highlight.
“I am really excited about Aceleron. I want to change the world for the better. I want everyone to access clean, renewable energy.
“Aceleron ticks all the boxes – low cost energy storage and promoting uptake of renewable energy.”
Chandan is all about going global.
‘We have Britain at the moment, and now the Caribbean. We are starting East Africa soon and there are lots of other market areas.”
In the meantime, Cummins and Chandin are changing the look of energy one continent at a time. (NS)
