Mission
We aim to provide grid upgrades and place real power in the hands of the people for the future of energy through an affordable, sustainable, and transparent marketplace.
The Problem
The grid was built to move power one way, from centralized plants to passive customers. That model prioritizes the success of large corporations who have failed to update grid structure alongside new technology. Data centers are driving record load growth and straining our infrastructure that was never designed to support such heavy volumes. To cover the gap, utilities are raising rates and placing the results of their failures in the hands of every American business and resident.
Ratepayers are financing a grid they barely use
Illinois rates have climbed sharply. Ameren residential rates have nearly doubled over five years, reaching around 15.5¢/kWh. ComEd just secured a $606M delivery rate increase. On a typical bill, nearly half the charges cover delivery. That's the cost of moving electrons across aging wire, not producing them.
If your neighbor's rooftop solar powers your EV 500 feet away, you still pay the utility a toll for the trip. ComEd charges about $0.02/kWh for this. Ameren charges $0.025/kWh. Neighborhoods are subsidizing a long-distance grid they aren't using.
The grid is running out of capacity
PJM's most recent capacity auction cleared at a record $333.44/MW-day, up from $28.92. That's more than a 1,000% increase against a 6,625 MW reliability shortfall. Ninety-four percent of the new load growth is data centers. MISO's auction followed a similar path. Prices jumped from $30 to $666.50/MW-day, a 22x spike. State agencies are warning that parts of Illinois could face mandated load shedding, meaning rolling blackouts, as early as 2031.
Local capital is leaving the neighborhood
We put real power in the hands of communities. Every dollar saved by cutting out unnecessary logistics becomes capital a town can reinvest in education, infrastructure, or any other community improvement.
A typical Illinois community with a few thousand homes consumes hundreds of thousands of megawatt-hours per year. At current delivery tolls, millions of dollars flow out of that community annually in wheeling fees alone. That's capital that could be circulating between local producers and local buyers. Instead, it's extracted to pay corporate dividends several states away.
Thesis
The energy conversation for the last decade has mostly been about generation. How do we make more clean power? Solar, wind, batteries, nuclear, all of it.
That's not actually the hard part anymore. We're already putting solar panels on roofs and batteries in garages faster than the grid knows what to do with them. The assets that could stabilize the grid are already here. They're just sitting idle. The real problem is routing and settlement.
We don't look at the grid like a public utility. We look at it like the worst logistics network in the country. Power gets hauled long distances, tolled at every junction, and priced by rules that were written before anyone had solar on their roof. We're rebuilding the routing from the ground up around four things the incumbents are ignoring.
Where We Are Now
- Public site at tinyhub.energy, deployed on Google Cloud Run with CI/CD
- Enterprise skeleton broken out into Development, Testing, and Production folders. Under each main folder you will find separate projects for platform, data, and blockchain with isolated IAM
- Real-time dashboard with WebSocket/SSE, matching engine, REST API live
- McHenry County (ComEd / PJM) mapped with Google Places + Google Solar APIs — real building footprints, real solar potential, tiered by mega / large / medium / small
- PostGIS spatial proximity matching + Open-Meteo DNI + MISO LMP
- McHenry County digital twin built on Google's full map stack: Places API for buildings, Solar API for per-roof kWh potential, Maps JS API for live rendering
- Pub/Sub topics + BigQuery pipelines for real-time grid events
- Live PJM real-time 5-minute LMP ingestion via
gridstatusAPI — actual grid prices driving every match and settlement
- Smart contracts deployed on Arbitrum Sepolia (L2): TinyHubMarket + TinyHubToken
- Batch settler with optimistic aggregation, ~95% gas savings vs per-trade
- Cloud KMS wallets, Firestore identity, Firebase Auth
- Built for future ERC-4337 account abstraction via managed Pimlico / Biconomy
- Open-standard CT clamp path ($35 Shelly EM / Emporia Vue via MQTT)
- Tesla Fleet API integration scoped for V2H and Powershare
- Hardware-agnostic by design: bypasses OEM walled gardens
- FERC Order 2222 as federal preemption shield over state ARES classification
- Deferred-fee counsel strategy with target firms (Cooley, Fenwick)
- Shadow market backtest architected as primary investor proof-of-economics
- McHenry County pilot deployment within ComEd / PJM territory
- 30-day shadow market backtest on McHenry County live data
- Securing funding for legal counsel, platform development, and 1st developer
Founder Note
I grew up in a small town and have also lived the city life. The disconnect and delayed innovation I've witnessed is the main reason Tiny Hub exists.
When Walmart came to small towns in the 80s and 90s, the local hardware stores, pharmacies, and grocers closed one by one. Amazon came for retail after that and finished the job. Every time, the pattern was the same: a larger player operated at a scale the local businesses couldn't match, captured the value that used to circulate locally, and permanently extracted it to somewhere else. The communities that lost the most had the least say in the decision.
My background is in finance, logistics and sales. I spent years inside trucking and rail, which is really just the business of moving valuable things long distances through rigid systems that demand their cut at every stage. Prior to this, I spent years in sales, learning how to actually talk to the people on both ends of those systems. The ones writing the checks and the ones absorbing the cost. Somewhere in between, I got hooked on data. Not dashboards for the sake of dashboards, but finding the real story hiding inside a messy spreadsheet and engineering a way to fix it.
Long distances, opaque pricing, monopoly tolls at every junction, and almost no way for a local community to participate in the value it produces. Illinois ratepayers are financing a macro-grid they barely use. Rooftops and home batteries worth billions sit idle because the hardware is locked down by corporate gatekeepers and the utility data is two days late.
I started building Tiny-Hub because the tools finally caught up to the problem. Google Cloud, Arbitrum, modern AI. Stack them right, and a single person can build the infrastructure that would have required a team of fifty just five years ago. That's not a flex; it's the point. If a small team can build grid-scale coordination, then the grid doesn't have to belong to the monopolies anymore. It can belong to the communities it serves.
That's what I'm doing here. Building the coordination layer that lets neighbors generate, share, and profit from their own power. The economic value needs to stay where it is produced. Small communities deserve a seat at the table and a voice that matters.
Great moments are born from great opportunity. I'd rather spend the next decade of my life trying to get this right so that the communities I grew up in benefit from innovation for once.