While working to bring a solar array back online in the American southwest, Noel Myers witnessed firsthand how an engineering company’s project estimate of 17 million over 6 months could balloon to nearly 25 million over 18 months.  This experience left him with both frustration toward the traditional insurance industry and a conviction that access to superior data and technical resources could solve these costly project overruns.

Noel believed new technology might offer a solution. However, his position as a serial energy entrepreneur with limited resources to put towards in-depth stakeholder research and market validation stalled full exploration of a market gap hunch —until he discovered NobleReach’s Innovation for Impact course.

NobleReach’s Innovation for Impact course was built to enable students to innovate and deploy solutions to urgent civil, security, social, and technological challenges at the speed of a start-up.  Using the Innovation for Impact methodology, students at Rollins College began to work with Noel as a problem mentor to address this pressing issue.

Their focus was on the residential solar market, but they ran into immediate roadblocks. Homeowners knew little about their solar installations, and insurance companies kept their risk and pricing models proprietary. What seemed like a dead end soon transformed through persistence. Through weekly meetings with Noel and interviewing over 68 stakeholders, the students discovered the real problem: businesses struggled to shop for complex solar-asset coverage. They pivoted to developing an app that would simplify finding appropriate insurance.

This discovery process proved invaluable for Noel. The students’ thorough research and dedication inspired him to build new parametric risk models based on their research. Ultimately, he realized the solution wasn’t becoming a data broker—it was overcoming resentment toward the insurance industry and becoming an insurer himself, thus addressing a critical challenge to America’s energy independence.

Based on the work done during the Innovation for Impact course and follow-on work with his risk engineering firm Edge Creek Power, Noel launched Sunereum Labs: a clean energy insurance company that is building a novel clean energy risk engine to push down premiums, speed up claims processing and payouts, and support repowering. While the company is still young, it is already gaining traction. Sunereum Labs was recently announced as one of the winners of the Insurance Innovation Prize via the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and InnSure, an organization dedicated to reinvigorating the insurance industry.

Noel credits the students at Rollins for this early catalyst: “Working with the Rollins College students through the Innovation for Impact course was refreshing and fun – I was exposed to new ideas and approaches, and it was rewarding to share some of my solar journey and perspectives with the next generation of builders and innovators”. In large part due to this experience, he has become a problem mentor again for two teams in this spring’s Innovation for Impact course, crediting the students’ ability to pivot his thinking as a key factor in this regard, as well as his broader desire to pass on advice to the next generation. In trying to replicate this experience for others, Noel has also joined NobleReach as a partner in attracting new problem mentors.