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Tech Brew

Energy

Tricia Crimmins

techbrew.com

Solar power leasing models are a tale as old as time: Companies install panels on a customer’s property, but the installer owns the system, which the customer pays them for. But solar and microgrid company SolMicroGrid has created a program that turns the traditional playbook on its head.

Through its new “energy-as-a-service” structure, SolMicroGrid is setting out to purchase existing solar arrays and microgrid systems from commercial and industrial owners and sell the energy generated back to them.

CEO Kirk Edelman told Tech Brew that the program offers owners of solar infrastructure a way to benefit from low cost energy, while letting go of the responsibility of system upkeep.

“[Customers] may not be paying enough attention to [their solar panels], and maybe they’re not operating as well today as they did when they were first installed. Maybe you’re not seeing the same output,” Edelman said. “We can come in and write a check and buy your grid or your array from you, and then we can either fix it and maintain it and try to get it back to what you originally thought you bought, or we can enhance it.”

Edelman also told Tech Brew that SolMicroGrid can buy systems from building developers.

The program was born out of an issue that Edelman said he witnessed in the solar industry that went unsolved. Many companies don’t want to take on the “asymmetrical risk” of securing the capital expense to own and operate a large portfolio of solar infrastructure.

SolMicroGrid can take on that risk because it’s a Morgan Stanley portfolio company, but there’s a tradeoff.

“I need to recover my capital, recover my operating expenses, and get a return,” Edelman said of the energy-as-a-service structure. “So you do have to sign up for an extended period of time, and that’s something we put out there right up front so that there’s no misunderstanding.”

Ideal customers for the arrangement, Edelman said, are owners of multiple solar arrays and systems that SolMicroGrid can buy and use to enter into a power purchase agreement with the previous owner.

“When you have capital like we have, it pays for us to have as many operating projects as possible,” Edelman told Tech Brew.

A solar power system being installed and a building.

SolMicroGrid launches program to buy existing solar power systems 

The first-of-its-kind program allows owners of solar panels to sell them to SolMicroGrid while still using their power. 

There’s a new type of battery in town: Last month, sodium ion battery manufacturer Peak Energy launched the largest sodium ion battery system in the world. The NFPP battery will be deployed to the electric grid at a site in Colorado and used by utilities and independent energy producers via a shared pilot program. 

In an interview with Tech Brew, Peak President and CCO Cameron Dales said that the launch marks the beginning of sodium ion technology being used for stationary storage and the sodium ion market writ large.

 Sodium ion batteries differ from lithium ion batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, in a couple of key ways. First, lithium ion batteries need to be meticulously cooled to avoid 

, or electrical current in the battery overheating and potentially catching fire, while sodium ion batteries maintain a more stable temperature. And second, lithium ion batteries have a higher energy density than sodium ion batteries.

Dales told Tech Brew that while lithium ion’s higher energy density lends the batteries to be better suited for EVs, sodium ion batteries are a great match for grid storage.

“You can build a [sodium ion] system that doesn't even have the cooling systems that these complicated [lithium ion] systems have. So you're saving a bunch of money on all the equipment up front,” Dales said. And without a cooling system, Peak is adding “more batteries so you make up a bunch of the energy density penalty at the cell level by having more room in the system to put more cells because you have less of that equipment.”

Because sodium ion and lithium ion batteries are so different, Dales said that he expects Peak’s launch to usher in an era of varying in battery solutions for a diversity of energy storage applications.

“There's no one size fits all best battery for every application,” he told Tech Brew. “We collectively believe that this really is a better fundamental approach for grid scale storage.”

 For now, Peak is building its energy storage system around sodium ion battery cells that are currently in production. Eventually, Dales said, the company intends to bring a cell manufacturing plant to the U.S. to make them domestically in order to recoup clean energy tax credits, per the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“[The Act] makes some pretty tough rules around how you access those tax credits, which are not going to be trivial for any of us to go meet,” Dales told Tech Brew, “but I think it is doable.”

Peak Energy launches first grid-scale sodium ion battery in US

It's the start of “commercial deployment of sodium ion technology” globally.

Peak Energy launches first grid-scale sodium ion battery in the U.S.

Jordyn Grzelewski

 amid cooling demand and the looming expiration of federal incentives.

Flexibility could be the name of the game for EV sector players in the coming months and years—and a new deal between General Motors and battery recycler Redwood Materials may point to a promising opportunity: energy storage.

In a July 16 news release, the two companies announced a non-binding memorandum of understanding “to accelerate deployment of energy storage systems using both new 

 and second-life battery packs from GM electric vehicles.”

GM touted the deal as “a significant step toward taking GM’s advanced battery technology beyond EVs.” The automaker already had been sending used EV battery materials to Redwood under an existing agreement.

GM has its own burgeoning energy business, which in October 

 a stationary energy storage unit for EVs dubbed “PowerBank.” The product allows users to transfer and store energy from the grid. Other automakers, like Tesla, also offer energy storage products.

Driving the agreement, according to GM and Redwood executives, is the surging demand for electricity, in part from a proliferation of new data centers.

“The market for grid-scale batteries and backup power isn’t just expanding, it’s becoming essential infrastructure,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s VP of batteries, propulsion, and sustainability, said in a statement. “Electricity demand is climbing, and it’s only going to accelerate. To meet that challenge, the US needs energy storage solutions that can be deployed quickly, economically, and made right here at home.”

JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood and Tesla’s co-founder and former chief technology officer, in a statement noted that “electricity demand is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, driven by AI and the rapid electrification of everything from transportation to industry.”

 around recovering end-of-life batteries and recycling their raw materials. The company reports receiving over 20 gigawatt hours of batteries per year, or the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs, “representing about 90% of all lithium-ion batteries and battery materials recycled in North America.” Redwood’s battery recycling customers include Lyft, Amazon, Nissan, Toyota, Ford, and Tesla and Panasonic’s battery manufacturing partnership, The Verge 

 dubbed Redwood Energy that it said would help “meet surging power demand from AI data centers and other applications.” Company leaders identified opportunities to put leftover usable capacity from used EV batteries back to work before recycling the batteries.

Redwood has established what it describes as “the largest second-life battery deployment in the world and the largest microgrid in North America,” which powers a data center for AI infrastructure company Crusoe.

In a story about Redwood’s new energy storage business, 

 noted that the company’s location east of Reno could be opportune given its relative proximity to data centers for the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

“Traditional grid expansion can’t keep up,” Redwood said in a release on its new line of business. “Renewables are intermittent. And imported, new energy storage is still too expensive to address the entire problem.”

The answer, according to the startup: “Repurposing used battery packs…into modular energy storage systems that bridge today’s infrastructure gaps with speed and scale.”

What’s driving a new energy storage partnership between GM and Redwood

Electricity demand from new data centers is expected to skyrocket in the coming years.

Pop quiz: What do energy experts and some House Republicans currently have in common? They’re both advocating for an all-of-the-above energy approach to meet the United States’ rising power demand.

 from S&P Global Commodity Insights commissioned by multiple energy entities, including the American Clean Power Association and the American Petroleum Institute, found that to satisfy the “record electricity demand growth over the next decade,” renewable and nonrenewable sources of energy will need to be used, along with resources like batteries. This conclusion echoes that of 

 sent by 21 House Republicans earlier this month underscoring the importance of using nonrenewables and clean energy to respond to energy demand.

Over the next 15 years, the study said, the US’s needs could increase up to 50% as a result of 

 and heating, and “underlying economic growth.” And that demand can be solved by a diverse supply of energy—specifically, more than 900 gigawatts of renewable power and batteries alongside 60 to 100 gigawatts of gas power.

“A diversified portfolio of generation technologies will be needed to ensure planning reserve margins are met and grid reliability is maintained,” the study noted.

And as S&P Global said, “the stakes are high”—which echoes a recent 

 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to increase power to meet demand, regardless of whether it’s from a renewable source. David Shepheard, an energy expert at Baringa, told Tech Brew earlier this month that the FERC’s decision was based on the reality that renewable energy isn’t currently as dispatchable as its alternatives.

“The problem is you can’t get the energy at the time that you need it,” Shepheard said. “What we need is battery and gas-fired generation to back it up, or new nuclear [power] at some point.”

 having a place in the mix, though it said the technology won’t be “at scale until [the] next decade.”

Latest US power demand study advocates for all-of-the-above energy approach

The S&P Global Commodity Insights study was commissioned by multiple renewable and nonrenewable energy organizations.

Recent extreme weather, like the hurricanes that devastated large parts of the US Southeast this fall, has underscored the fragility of infrastructure in the face of increasingly severe storms.

Hurricane Milton, for example, left millions of customers in Florida without power. The storm’s force was unique, but widespread outages following extreme weather are all too common.

As the climate crisis ensures these scenarios will continue to play out, and as electricity demand grows in response to new 

 and the electrification of sectors like 

, there’s growing attention on the need to make the 

RS Technologies is one of the companies trying to make this happen. The Ontario-based company—whose name stands for “Resilient Structures”—aims to do so by supplying composite materials-based utility poles that it claims last longer, require less maintenance, are more resistant to corrosion, and are better at withstanding extreme weather than conventional wooden utility poles.

“We’ve never had a weather-caused pole failure—ever,” CEO John Higgins told Tech Brew. “That doesn’t mean that big trees don’t fall on our poles and poles break. But as it relates to wind, ice, and so on, our poles don’t fail.”

RS started in 1995 and made its first utility poles in 2003. In 2020, it expanded into the US, where it has locations in Utah and Texas. The company’s products are used by roughly 500 utilities and sold in dozens of countries, according to RS.

RS’s technology involves two primary materials: fiberglass and a proprietary polyurethane resin. The company employs a manufacturing process called filament winding.

“We make them by winding the fibers back and forth on a mandrel. And we wind them both circumferentially, which means around the circumference of the mandrel, and then axially, which means back and forth on the mandrel,” Higgins said. “The result is you get fibers that criss-cross. And that makes for a really strong pole.”

The majority of utility poles in North America are made of wood, and Higgins said he doesn’t expect that to change. But he contends that RS’s tech can make a big difference in specific use cases.

“Utilities use our composite poles as a way of augmenting critical points within their networks,” he said. “There are certain poles that are more prone to failure. And if they do fail, they are really, really hard to restore, or have a particularly profound impact on how fast the system comes back up or how much it costs to bring the system back up.”

It makes sense to use composite poles to support particularly important infrastructure, like power distribution systems that support hospitals, as well as in locations that are difficult to access or where it would be expensive to install a conventional pole, he said. Composite poles are also well-suited to environments where wood is vulnerable to degradation.

“It’s never going to be every pole,” Higgins said. But, he argued, swapping out something like 20% of the hundreds of millions of utility poles in North America could make a big difference.

 for its products amid more extreme weather, the clean energy transition, and the construction of energy-hungry data centers to support artificial intelligence.

“Old infrastructure coupled with the weather events, wildfires, and then the demand for electricity, just sets up an overwhelming need in the coming years for a resilient and reliable grid,” Rob Krotee, RS’s EVP, told Tech Brew.

In May 2023, RS announced it would build a new manufacturing plant in Houston to help meet growing demand, including from CenterPoint Energy, a Texas-based electric and natural gas utility with millions of customers across six states. CenterPoint is using RS products “to enhance its resiliency for extreme weather events as part of its grid hardening program,” per a news release.

“RS’s infrastructure products are an important component of our efforts to provide CenterPoint Energy customers with a cost-effective, resilient grid,” Lynnae Wilson, SVP of CenterPoint’s electric business, said in a statement.

Last July, RS announced new credit agreements, totaling $148.5 million, to support further expansion.

The upfront installation costs for composite poles are higher than wooden poles, depending on the scenario, Higgins acknowledged, but he pointed to lifetime cost savings utilities can reap.

And there are other alternatives to wooden poles—materials like concrete and steel, for example, or the practice of putting power lines underground to protect them from wind, tree, and ice damage.

Undergrounding, Higgins said, is the “gold standard.” But he said it’s significantly more expensive than RS’s solution.

“Somebody’s gotta pay for that. Ultimately, that means you as a rate payer,” he said. “The nice thing about our poles is that you can get a majority of the resiliency benefits from undergrounding at a fraction of the cost.”

RS Technologies' utility poles along a highway. 

How swapping out wooden utility poles could help shore up the electric grid

“Old infrastructure coupled with the weather events, wildfires, and then the demand for electricity, just sets up an overwhelming need in the coming years for a resilient and reliable grid,” one RS Technologies exec tells Tech Brew.

The clean energy transition has been a hot topic on the campaign trail, where presidential candidates have 

 drastically different visions on basically everything climate-related.

For consensus on the US’s current approach to tackling the climate crisis, look to business leaders in the clean energy industry.

E2, a nonpartisan business group focused on environmental and economic issues, recently commissioned a 

 from BW Research of more than 900 business stakeholders to get their thoughts on the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The law, which went into effect in mid-2022, includes hundreds of billions of dollars in direct grants and tax credits to spur the clean energy transition.

The results suggest that the IRA has been a boon for business, and that its rollback could lead to layoffs, operations moving to other countries, and business closures.

“The impacts of this landmark policy are now crystal clear––as are the consequences if it’s repealed or rolled back,” E2 Executive Director Bob Keefe said in a statement. “We now also know that if it goes away, businesses will lose money, workers will lose jobs, and our economy will lose steam.”

 that if reelected, he would rescind unspent IRA funds.

Experts have said that a repeal is unlikely, but that other changes are possible. Utility Dive recently 

, based on a report by Columbia University legal experts, that it would be difficult for the government to claw back funds that have already been disbursed, but that it’s feasible for the administration to reallocate or not award IRA funding.

 suggested that tax credits for EVs and clean energy projects would be “especially vulnerable” to rollback attempts.

 that 60% of major clean energy projects announced under the IRA are in GOP congressional districts, a finding backed up by other reports.

In this latest survey, more than half of respondents said they believed their companies would “lose business or revenue” if the IRA were repealed. More than one-fifth said they’d likely exit the clean energy space altogether, and 11% said they’d likely close their business.

Around 85% characterized the IRA as “very important” or “somewhat important” to business growth.

Under the IRA, businesses have announced $130 billion in investments in 338 major clean energy and vehicle projects, such as factories for EVs, batteries, and solar panels, per E2.

image of renewable energy sources and other climate tech

Survey: Clean energy leaders say IRA repeal would be bad for business 

A new survey commissioned by nonpartisan business group E2 found that clean energy business leaders view the IRA as a boon.

Octopus Energy is trying to get its arms around a complicated issue: the clean-energy transition and the increase in electricity demand that’ll accompany it.

The renewable energy company is off to a strong start in its home market, the United Kingdom, where this year it became the largest domestic electricity supplier. Now, backed by a $9 billion valuation and investors like former Vice President Al Gore’s investment firm, it’s working to replicate that model in the Wild Wild West—the Texas energy market.

Octopus Energy’s US division, based in Houston, has an array of offerings, from thermostats to batteries to EV charging, with an emphasis on how each of those products interacts with the electric grid.

“We’re focused on reimagining what retail energy looks like,” Michael Lee, Octopus Energy US CEO, told Tech Brew, “especially as this particular state, Texas, goes through the energy transition at light speed as we bring on a ton of renewable energy, a lot of new electricity demand as we electrify everything, and really help balance this grid.”

 that allows households to select their own energy suppliers, unlike most other parts of the country. The Lone Star State also has its own electric grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

“Texas is a fascinating place…We use about seven times more power than the average customer from the UK,” Lee said. “There is a lot of power consumption happening in Texas on the residential side and that’s almost purely because it’s so darn hot in Texas and we are using air conditioning 300 days a year.”

These factors, plus Texas’s abundant renewable energy supplies (it’s the 

 of wind power in the country), make it a fertile proving ground for the concept of load flexibility, which involves adjusting energy usage to align with supply.

Lee thinks about load flexibility in two ways, he told us. One is how to more precisely align thermostat usage with the times of day when the grid is carrying excess solar and wind energy: “That’s unlocking the built environment—and that’s approachable by every single person.”

The second is figuring out how to electrify those parts of our society that currently rely largely on fossil fuels—like transportation.

“We don’t want to bring on more electricity usage without making that electricity usage smart,” Lee said. “Those are our two major focuses in the US.”

The company offers a suite of products it calls “Intelligent Octopus,” a program that helps customers optimize their energy usage based on signals from the grid.

“What we’re really thinking about here is, we want the megawatts…to shift around,” Lee said, “but what we really want to do is understand each individual customer.”

Take EV charging, for example. Amid concerns that millions more vehicles plugging in will further strain the grid’s capacity, one strategy that can be used to mitigate the impact is incentivizing users to charge their vehicles during off-peak hours.

 estimated that it would require at least 20% more power generation capacity to accommodate EV charging during peak demand hours if the issue isn’t addressed. But there’s optimism that EVs don’t have to be a burden, and could even be an asset for the grid.

Octopus is enabling smarter charging in the UK with an 

 that shifts charging overnight, when demand is lower and electricity is cheaper. In February, Octopus 

 the UK’s first vehicle-to-grid tariff, which guarantees free EV charging for users who sell energy back to the grid during peak hours.

 that Octopus is “trying to build…a world where we have the right amount of generation at any moment in time, for all of our customers, from green sources. Then we flex the demand from our customers—we help our customers use it at the time that’s greenest.”

Philip Krein, a faculty member in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told us that easing electrification’s impact on the grid will require proactively managing things like EV charging. He’s a proponent of adding widespread slow charging options and of smart charging strategies that promote plugging in during off-peak hours.

“There are times out in the California system where basically they have to dial back solar energy during the day,” he said, “because there isn’t enough load to absorb it and they don’t have any place to store it.”

 in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand—entered the US market after acquiring Evolve Energy in 2020.

 a free charging program to customers in Texas earlier this year under its EV leasing company. And Octopus offers smart charging features to its energy customers; it uses software to align a vehicle’s charging cycle to when energy is cheapest overnight and offers an approximately 20% discount on its standard energy rate for customers who opt in.

The company further deepened its US presence by 

 two solar farms in Ohio and Pennsylvania, part of a plan to make major investments in the US renewables market in the coming years.

Asked about whether Octopus has plans to expand its retail energy programs to other parts of the country, Lee said the company is focused on Texas at the moment.

“The market structure really rewards load flexibility here in Texas…why it’s such a central focus of ours is that this is a really great market structure to get customers to be major participants in the energy transition,” he added.

A recent ERCOT report estimated that energy usage on Texas’s grid is going to double in the 

. At the same time, the grid is slated to bring massive amounts of new renewable energy on board.

“All of this means that the signals to be doing this will only become brighter,” Lee said, “and will only become more important as we go through this energy transition.”