Installer spotlight: Atma Energy

From graduate students to solar business entrepreneurs

In 2013, Jaro Nummikoski was a graduate student at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Finding Jaro’s graduate thesis compelling, his professor looped another student, Supratim Srinivasan, into the project.

Like the professor, Supratim was impressed by Jaro’s work and eager to connect and collaborate. Jaro and Supratim met in 2014, and they would ultimately go on to combine their business background and engineering expertise to start their own business: Atma Energy.

Spearheading energy innovation for Texas homeowners and businesses

Supratim and Jaro founded Atma Energy to be a technology-forward solar company that goes above and beyond to support customers’ unique needs with customized, tech-enabled energy solutions. After founding the company in early 2020, Jaro and Supratim successfully navigated their new business through an unprecedented economic environment. Today, Atma Energy has completed hundreds of solar projects for San Antonio customers and helped advance world-class energy technology.

Atma Energy offers customers a full range of energy solutions, including solar and energy storage systems. As a testament to the company’s technological innovation and commitment to end-to-end energy results for its customers, Atma launched its own online proposal tool for homeowners to see if solar is right for them—no strings attached. Atma isn’t concerned with making a hard sell, and lets the technology speak for itself. In fact, Supratim patented the company’s own virtual power plant (VPP)—one of the first of its kind to aggregate and integrate solar and battery systems with a larger power system to provide critical energy flexibility.

Powering the energy transition with Enphase

Cutting-edge technology from Enphase has helped Atma Energy accelerate the adoption of clean energy across San Antonio, as well as the Houston and Dallas areas. Atma was one of the first installers to deploy Enphase’s most powerful battery to date, the IQ Battery 5P, and also adopted the Enphase IQ Microinverter lineup, which they say “blew competitors out of the water, from service to everything else.”

Designing systems with both savings and resilience in mind, Atma Energy is focused on educating its customers on the value of solar and how pairing battery storage can solidify their energy independence. Because of this, Atma Energy’s battery attachment rate for home energy systems is more than 60%, which significantly exceeds the national average of approximately 15%.

No matter the setting, Atma Energy trusts Enphase products for their most exciting projects. For example, the company installed an Enphase system at the John Knox Summer Camp to help mitigate the organization’s carbon footprint and reduce its energy bills.

Atma Energy also installed a 14 kW solar system that includes 39 IQ8 Microinverters on the camp’s meeting house, which now generates 21,000 kWh of electricity annually. Beyond powering its operations, the camp uses the solar array to power camper education. The camp streams Enphase’s solar monitoring software 24 hours a day via a kiosk monitor in the meeting house, so campers can observe how solar power works throughout the day.

Texas homeowners are increasingly turning towards reliable solar energy systems to power their homes during times of extreme grid stress, like heat waves. This includes Atma customer Michael Valentine, whose iron-clad, ranch-style home is equipped with an off-grid Enphase system, including solar and battery storage. The 8.28 kW system is complete with 23 IQ8 Microinverters, two IQ Battery 10Ts, and one 20 kW generator. As a testament to Enphase’s technological excellence that drives customer satisfaction, Valentine has been thrilled to be one of the first in Atma’s sales process. He often runs drill outages to test his system, and likens it to a “shiny new Corvette.”

Atma Energy believes in three main pillars: transparency, technology, and education. The company’s dedication to fulfilling each of these pillars has led Atma to become one of the leading solar installers in the region.

Based in and servicing the San Antonio area, Atma Energy also services the Austin, Houston, and Dallas areas. Learn more at the Atma website.