ALUMNI IMPACT: Jorg Heinemann ’84

Jorg Heinemann ’84

Jorg Heinemann ’84 sees the world through the mind of a mechanical engineer, the soul of a changemaker and the heart of a Lancer.

As CEO of EnerVenue, a startup ready to revolutionize the clean energy sector with a simple, virtually non-degradable, renewable and lasts-forever battery, Jorg loves thinking about how systems solve problems. “My brain is wired like a mechanical engineer,” says Jorg, who earned his electrical engineering degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I’ll walk into a building, look at it, and be able to tell you where the plumbing is lined up, how the electrical is wired and so on.”

Coding before coding was a thing, his high school job was writing billing software for his father’s solar panel company. The German-born Klaus Heinemann, PhD, a Stanford materials research scientist and solar panel entrepreneur who holds several patents for solar energy engineering and ozone water purification, ran his company out of the family home with Jorg and his brother Jan “Mike” Heinemann ’86 helping with prototypes. At Saint Francis, Jorg programmed on bulky, original IBM PCs in the school’s first computer science class, ran track, played trumpet in the marching band, took lots of science classes and tried unsuccessfully for four years to score better than a B+ in Madame West’s French class. He thought of her often when he and his family — he has four kids, ages 16 to 28 — lived in France before he took the EnerVenue job. Jorg, who now lives in San Carlos, is an avid cyclist. He and his wife, Jennifer, have ridden their tandem bike all over the world, though he admits the “control freak” in him can’t ride in the back.

It’s the Holy Cross values he learned, though, that inspire how he leads the growing EnerVenue team that’s skyrocketed from 12 to 200-plus employees since its launch in 2020: “What Saint Francis gave me that I carry with me forever is what I tell my team,” says Jorg, whose sister Connie Heinemann Maday ‘98 also attended Saint Francis. “I say, ‘There’s what we’re doing as a business and our purpose for our shareholders and for the planet. Then there’s how we do it and how matters — how we interact with each other, how we communicate, how we treat each other with respect, our values.’ ”

EnerVenue’s nickel hydrogen battery has an impressive provenance. NASA has used the technology for decades on the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station. But it was too expensive for commercial applications back on Earth. When the electric vehicle market prompted a need for long-lasting, safer batteries, EnerVenue’s founder Yi Cui, PhD, took another look at his invention and redesigned it with cheaper materials that outperform the old model.

“Our battery is engineered to last for over 30,000 charge/discharge cycles, which would be three times daily for 30 years,” Jorg explains. “It can be charged quickly or slowly, and then discharged quickly or slowly.” But unlike cellphone batteries, EnerVenue’s battery won’t catch on fire, wear out or need maintenance or replacing. It works in freezing and high temperatures and is extraordinarily durable.

The no-maintenance factor is a big deal in the power industry, Jorg says: “Maintenance is typically about one-third of the levelized cost. Having a battery that lasts forever with power, flexibility and doesn’t require any maintenance is game-changing. We call our battery ‘storage made simple’ because lithium batteries are really complicated. There’s all kinds of sophisticated software and systems to keep them at the right temperature and not charge too fast or too slow or drain too much. Ours is the opposite.”

He’s very proud of its plant-friendly properties. “EnerVenue’s battery is fully recyclable and can be made anywhere on Earth,” Jorg says. For the next two years, the

The CEO of EnerVenue, Jorg is passionate about making a positive impact on the planet.

company is manufacturing its batteries for commercial applications, focusing on the grid scale energy storage market. With the EnerVenue batteries strung together with solar panels, “the combination solar-plusstorage effectively becomes the power plant of the future,” he adds. EnerVenue’s residential use envisions its batteries as part of the home construction, placed where previous batteries could not be due to fire and maintenance concerns.

Jorg’s journey to the clean energy field began with a successful 20-year consulting career. “I had my dream consulting job at Accenture, mostly in the high-tech world, but I wanted to go back to the ‘family business’ of doing something that would have a better impact on the planet,” he says. “For my dad, it was about making a difference, about using clean fuels.”

With Accenture’s blessing, he formed a consulting practice within Accenture focused on sustainability. “One of the first things I did was contact solar companies like SunPower.” Instead of landing a consulting contract, SunPower offered him a job. “By the time I left the company in 2016, solar was by far the lowest cost form of power generation,” adds Jorg, who went on to leadership roles with multiple battery companies including Primus Power Corp. before leading EnerVenue.

“I am a builder-fixer at heart,” he says. “Starting a company is probably the ultimate build-and-fix opportunity. It requires everything to come together.” Part of what charges his approach is what he learned four decades ago in Mountain View. “Saint Francis works really hard to help instill in the students a sense of purpose and a sense of doing things that matter beyond the individual,” Jorg says. “What can I do to help society?”

In high school, Jorg built software and helped create prototypes for his father’s solar panel company.

Learn more about EnerVenue at enervenue.com.

Powering an Innovative Life

We asked Jorg Heinemann ’84 for lessons learned on how to cultivate an innovative approach to work and life.

KEEP IT SIMPLE. This is one of our core themes. There is a complicated answer to every problem, every technical challenge. The knee-jerk reaction is to add some kind of complexity to solve whatever the problem is. [At EnerVenue] we force ourselves to keep going until we find a really simple way to do it.

LEARN HOW TO LEARN. That’s what Saint Francis taught me, the belief that I could learn anything. It didn’t matter what it was. That’s followed me through my whole career. We need people who are smart, creative and know how to learn. Learn the principles of how to get stuff done or how things work and then apply those creatively to solve tomorrow’s problems.

THINK NEARER TERM. When I started at Accenture, there were people in my starting cohort whose goal was to be a partner. They burned out in the first year because they realized how hard that was going to be. I didn’t focus on a specific career goal. I focused on learning, making sure I was contributing something, working with good people, and having fun. That was my yardstick. As long as those things are true, good things are likely to happen.

GO AFTER WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. You’ll find a way. I like to do transformational things. I like to take things that are not performing as well as they could, improve the processes and systems and restructure the team so we can achieve a goal.

EQ BEATS IQ. In high school I always wanted to be the smartest person in the room [wanted to, not was], thinking IQ was the key to success. The business world taught me that emotional intelligence actually matters much more. Fortunately, that’s learnable, even for hard-wired propeller heads like me. Saint Francis’ increased emphasis on socialemotional learning in recent years aligns well with that need.