The Lyra Innovation Lab is a hands-on business incubation lab that teaches our employees how to develop, prototype, pilot, and scale their innovations that may be used for product commercialization. Its goal is to foster a culture of innovation and intrapreneurship across the company.

Since April, our Innovation Team alongside support from senior leadership, have selected six teams from a pool of 32 submissions to participate in the 2022 Lyra Innovation Competition Lab.

1. Second Life for EV Batteries
2. EV Charging Partnerships
3. WattsApp – Watts Impacted by You
4. Bundled Renewables Services Super-Contract
5. Decarbonization of Gas Assets: Distributed Local Energy Carbon Sequestration
6. Methanation Carbon Neutral Natural Gas

Recently, these teams participated in the second part of this year’s Lyra Innovation Lab competition, presenting their business model prototype to a live panel of executive judges.

The executive judging panel was tasked with selecting the winning team based on the following judging criteria: target customer, critical assumptions, testing plan, customer insights, and solution progress.

The winner of the prototype competition was Bundled Renewables Services Super-Contract. Members of this team are: Janise Clancey, Cameron Stalker and Zach Chapin. 

Their solution would develop a holistic approach for our customers interested in renewable and carbon free energy solutions, incorporating services such as utility scale solar, renewable natural gas, as well as onsite solutions like rooftop solar, EV charging and battery storage. By providing this holistic energy service, our customers can both save money by bundling the energy solutions together as well as save time by only having to work with one provider directly instead of several different providers.

“The quality and effort that each team has put into their ideas has far exceeded our expectations. It is an honor to work alongside such intelligent, open-minded, bright employee innovators. This program has allowed a diverse group of employees from across the company to share their talents and resources with the Lyra team and their colleagues. This is just the beginning of something great,” said Will McCausland, Manager of Innovation & Commercialization.

As we approach the next phase of the competition, each team continues to work on their prototype and business plan — fine-tuning and growing their solutions to fit a focus area of Dominion Energy’s business needs.

The final competition will take place in September, focusing on each team’s business plan. Stay tuned to see which of the 6 teams comes out on top of the entire competition!