Andrea Barber, RatedPower Founder, on a mission for a more sustainable planet
The need to fight climate change and invest in sustainable energy is obvious.
Working with renewable energies all her career, Andrea Barber noticed how inefficient the designing process of a solar plant was. That’s why, together with her Co-founders Juan Romero and Miguel Angel Torrero, she founded RatedPower to help companies optimize their processes when doing the study, analysis, design, and engineering of photovoltaic plants.
pvDesign, RatedPower’s software, allows engineering companies across the globe to save 85% of the time they used to spend on the designing process of a solar plant, helping engineering teams to find the best layout configuration and reducing the length of the entire process from months to minutes. Using Google Earth’s technology they also facilitate the design and implementation of solar plants anywhere in the world.
In 2016 the 3 Co-founders started working on their project from the Google for Startups Campus in Madrid, Google’s open space for entrepreneurs in Spain. There they met a vibrant community made with diverse startups from diverse industries and backgrounds they could exchange learnings and experience with and, in January 2019, they became a part of Google for Startups Residency, a 6 months acceleration program that let them make Campus their office and gave them the opportunity to work hand in hand with international experts from Google, who helped them solve their most pressing challenges: from fundraising, to hiring and managing a team, optimising their processes, etc…
Today RatedPower has facilitated the construction of 288 projects worldwide, which translates into 17.3 GW of power generated, equivalent to the consumption of 9 million households. Additionally, this results in an annual reduction of 12 million tons of CO2 and an annual decrease of 18 million oil barrels.
Last year they grew their team from 23 to 30 people (50% of them women) and expanded to China, Australia & the United States.
Nowadays RatedPower is a part of Google for Startups Alumni community, that grants them access to custom support, connections with relevant players from the ecosystem, and a powerful network of entrepreneurs like them, always available for knowledge exchange and experience sharing.
Their ambitious goal for 2021 onwards is making pvDesign the standard software for the design and engineering of photovoltaic solar plants. They keep working hard everyday to achieve that goal, and keep taking steps towards their mission to facilitate a more sustainable planet.