How LEAF is Taking on Solar Tech

Interview by Shannon Marshburn and Evan Haugh of LEAF

“I hope I can continue to provide exciting updates on LEAF to UARF for years to come, as this is only the beginning of our vision for LEAF, the Logically Engineered Automation Features company.” Evan Haugh tells us in an interview about the journey of him and his team with the startup, Logically Engineering Automation Features Ltd., or LEAF for short.
The team is focused on solar design applications to aid in the electrical wiring of solar panels and helping to make electrical engineers' lives easier. 
In this interview, Evan walks us through his journey and how he and his team overcame challenges they faced.


How did the idea for your product/service come about? 

Evan: LEAF was born out of my own frustrations as an electrical engineering intern who spent most of his day doing the same thing over and over. Simply put, every solar array from 10 to 100,000 solar panels in size must be wired together in a well-coordinated method that can only be done by manually drafting every connection between every panel in a CAD program like AutoCAD. Throughout this internship, I spent most of my time drafting these pesky lines and I thought to myself that there must be a better way. Four years later, I'm proud to say that the solution we've developed to solve this problem, LEAF, will be released for beta trials on the AutoDesk Appstore on January 15th, 2023.

​How does your business look different now than when you first started? 

Evan: In the beginning, LEAF was just meant to be a "hack" for myself and a few coworkers who despised this work known in the industry as stringing. When I realized I wouldn't be able to finish it before my internship was over, I promised my coworkers I'd continue to work in my downtime and completely automate the arduous task of stringing. It wasn't until I was accepted as a fellow of the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University that I realized that there were far more solar engineers in the world than just my old coworkers that could benefit from my automation of the stringing process. What started as a modest attempt to "hack" a work frustration is now a team of 5 committed to delivering automation to ALL the solar engineers of the world.


What are you most proud of relating to your business?
​
Evan: I'm most proud of my team. When we all graduated from Case Western, we decided we weren't ready to throw ourselves 100% into the professional and financial uncertainty that can come from pursuing a very early startup full-time. Instead, we all got jobs or continued our education in our respective fields of study while balancing LEAF part time. I couldn't be more proud of my teammates for trusting in my idea and continuing to commit their precious free time away from their full-time jobs to making LEAF a reality.

​How has UARF helped you on your entrepreneurial journey?

Evan: The UARF I-Corps program taught me that a good idea needs overwhelming support from potential future customers but because our product is so niche, contacting the precise kind of engineer I needed to speak with to validate LEAF was next to impossible. So, in September of this year using a mixture of UARF and other Northeast Ohio grants and prize money, we traveled to the Solar Power International conference in Los Angeles, CA to exhibit to the 27,000 annual attendees with our very own LEAF booth. We hoped that this event would attract a high concentration of the very specific subset of solar engineers target customers, and we were right. After speaking with over 400 interested individuals, we collected over 100 beta users which far surpassed our goal of just 10 and almost every engineer further validated our vision for LEAF and our stringing automation.


I'm very thankful to have been welcomed into the UARF with open arms at the very beginning of our journey with LEAF. Without the guidance from individuals such as Nicholas Glavan, Elyse Ball, and Bob Leach, we could not have made it to where we are today.