Helping Farmers and the Planet: The Smart Energy Company Wins InnovateNB Award

The Smart Energy Company is a renewable energy company led by two brothers, Jeff and Mark McAloon. Their mission is to help farmers save over a billion dollars in electricity costs by installing their NOREASTER micro-solar farm, a groundbreaking innovation in the field of agrotechnology in Atlantic Canada.

Jeff McAloon (left) and Mark McAloon (right)

The owners' inspiring work won them the Economic Impact through Innovation Award at this year's InnovateNB Awards. InnovateNB is an annual celebration of innovators and their outstanding contributions to New Brunswick's technology and innovation ecosystem. 

The Spark That Started It All

The Smart Energy Company was incorporated in 2016 when the owners discovered they could make a positive impact with the farming community by helping them become more self-sufficient. Over the years, the company has evolved its approach and product based on field experience and feedback from farm customers. One such example happened while on site in Shannon, New Brunswick, assessing a farm's solar energy potential. The farm owners - the Colpitts family - asked how they could be more involved in the project.

“Farmers are very self-reliant,” explains Jeff McAloon, “independence is a core value for them.”

The Colpitts pointed across the field to a large dairy barn they had built from a kit that provided them with the necessary materials and instructions to do it themselves. It was then that the brothers realized that farmers could play an important role in the installation of their own solar power, an approach that had never been used before. The Smart Energy Company piloted the NOREASTER micro-solar farm with instructions to ensure that the Colpitts could actively and safely participate in the installation of the non-electrical components of the system.

The NOREASTER is the first commercial-grade micro-solar farm kit that can be self-assembled, offering farmers a way to shape and sustain their own energy future. In addition to a 50-year warranty, the NOREASTER is specifically designed to withstand harsh weather conditions, maximizing energy harvesting all year round.

The NOREASTER is a leader in clean technology, as this product makes the installation of on-farm solar energy even more accessible. In fact, the results show that the NOREASTER reduces CO2 emissions by up to 220,000 kg in the first 30-years of production, a major step towards reducing our global carbon footprint. 

McCrea Farm

Where Innovation Meets Community

Over the past three years, they have developed a very important element of their company: their team, which has grown from 8 to 19 people and includes a sales and marketing team deployed in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario. Additionally, they have a team of New Brunswick based engineers with doctoral-level engineering skills, technologists, and a construction and procurement team.

For the team at The Smart Energy Company, the important thing is to get to know the farmers and help them understand how they use energy, how they interact with it and what they can do to manage it better. Like most industries, the agriculture sector is faced with increasing electrification of on-farm equipment, rising electricity rates and increasingly unreliable supply of electricity. Building more energy self-reliance is critically important to our food supply chain in Canada.

“When farmers start producing their own energy,” Mark McAloon points out, “it’s a satisfying and exciting experience because they can really feel that empowerment by taking control of something they can produce themselves.”

Advice to Aspiring Innovators

The Smart Energy Company emphasizes the importance of being well surrounded to achieve success. They recognize their team’s efforts over the past decade and the farmers whose collaboration has advanced renewable energy and innovation in the province. Winning the prize for Economic Impact through Innovation at the InnovateNB Awards validated their team's hard work, but also allowed them to be recognized for a company they created together as brothers.

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To find out more about how The Smart Energy Company is helping farmers and the planet by going solar, visit their website.

The result was the first example in Canada of a large-scale commercial solar farm built by farmers using the NOREASTER. The project won this year’s Clean50 Top Project Award which celebrates exceptional contributors to the clean economy.

The Smart Energy Company's NOREASTER has a significant economic impact on the agricultural sector by reducing investment costs for the farmer – with some farms eliminating their electricity bill entirely. This solution has grown to become a popular choice with the farming community. Over the three years that the NOREASTER In-A-Box kit has been on the market, the company has seen an increase going from 20% to 90% adoption rate for this product among their clients.

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