Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.

Tech Brew

Energy

Jordyn Grzelewski

techbrew.com

 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.

Tricia Crimmins

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.”

How Octopus Energy aims to wrangle Texas’s clean-energy transition

The retail energy provider is building a business around the idea that we can more efficiently align demand with existing energy supply.

Replacing gas- and diesel-guzzling ICE vehicles with EVs has been touted as key to 

EVs eliminate tailpipe emissions, but the process of making them isn’t exactly squeaky clean. A vehicle, whether ICE or EV, emits about a third of its lifetime carbon pollution before it ever hits the road, 

 Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights advocacy nonprofit.

But there are burgeoning efforts to tackle one of the dirtiest aspects of auto manufacturing and heavy industry in general: steelmaking.

Traditional steelmaking accounts for about 7% of carbon emissions globally, according to 

; steel industry emissions must be halved by 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, in order to meet climate goals like 

Emerging technologies that promise to drastically reduce emissions from steel manufacturing will play an important role. And experts say the auto industry, a huge consumer of emissions-heavy primary steel, will be key to driving demand for “green steel,” or steel that’s produced without fossil fuels.

“We need automakers to be making more EVs and we need the infrastructure to support EVs and we need people to buy EVs,” said Carly Oboth, senior supply-chain campaigner for the climate program at Public Citizen, which is 

 for green-steel adoption by the auto industry. “But we also need to think about the materials that cars are made with.”

Let’s brush up on some steelmaking basics.

Steel is made from iron ore that is processed largely in coal-burning blast furnaces.

This process is the main culprit behind the approximately 3.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide that, 

, steelmaking produces annually. In the US today, there are 

 integrated steel mills—the facilities that use this process—in operation.

The primary pathways to emissions-free steel involve using renewable hydrogen or electricity to produce what’s known as direct reduced iron, or DRI.

Using renewable energy sources to process DRI can virtually eliminate emissions from the process, but the problem is that low-carbon hydrogen is in short supply; none of the DRI plants in the US use green hydrogen today.

“This type of plant runs on natural gas today,” Kaitlyn Ramirez, a senior associate on clean-energy think tank RMI’s industries team focused on hydrogen and steel, told Tech Brew.

“There’s an opportunity for these DRI plants and this technology…to instead use clean hydrogen as the fuel and the reductant for that process and be able to produce green iron or green steel,” she added. “That’s the main pathway that we’re seeing in the near term that’s going to allow for large, commercial-scale, near-zero-emissions steel production.”

 an investment worth as much as $1 billion to 

 in Mississippi and Ohio that will be the first of their kind in the US.

The Ohio project involves transitioning a blast-furnace facility to a hydrogen-powered DRI plant.

The Mississippi facility, operated by Swedish steelmaker SSAB, will produce DRI with green hydrogen. The DRI will then be sent to SSAB’s electric arc furnace in Iowa.

SSAB is a partner in a pilot plant in Sweden—just one of several green-steel projects in development in Europe.

The plant is part of an initiative from SSAB, LKAB, and Vattenfall called Hybrit (hydrogen breakthrough ironmaking technology), and it uses a process that starts by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen, SSAB explains, is used to remove oxygen in the iron ore. The byproduct of this process is water, which is then reintroduced into the process to produce hydrogen.

“This creates a natural, closed cycle,” 

. “No polluted water is being discharged, no carbon dioxide is emitted, and the coal stays in the ground where it belongs.”

 the world’s first green steel produced without coal in 2021. Hybrit plans to open a demonstration plant capable of producing 1.3 million metric tons of green steel annually by 2026, 

 with major automotive customers including Porsche and ZF Group. Its operations will include a DRI facility where hydrogen will react with iron ore to create iron that can be used to make steel in a process that lowers emissions by as much as 95%, 

, with electricity coming from local renewable energy sources.

Stateside, Bill Gates-backed startup Electra recently announced it’s capable of producing “emissions-free iron without melting ore on commercial-sized prototypes,” 

 a technology that uses electricity to separate iron from ore without releasing any carbon emissions.

To help boost demand signals, RMI last year convened a Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform, a tool that allows corporations to jointly purchase near-zero-emissions steel in North America. Members—which include Microsoft and real estate developer Trammell Crow Company—aim to collectively request up to 2 million tons of green steel.

“Hopefully with continued push from buyers that are ambitious and looking to meet their climate goals,” Ramirez said, “we can get producers and more green-steel plants online.”

RMI estimates that there is enough demand to support at least three US green-steel plants by 2030.

“Since not one ton of US steel currently produced is near-zero emissions,” RMI analysts wrote in a 

, “American steelmakers are at a critical investment juncture: build near-zero-emissions steel plants now or miss the boat by forcing US companies to import to meet their near-zero-emissions steel needs.”

The biggest barriers to adoption, however, are on the supply side, with no green-steel production yet online in the US and 

 of renewable energy to power the plants that will be needed. For example, last year, just 20% of electricity in the US came from renewables.

“Getting the supply in the ground and produced is the critical thing that’s going to be needed…to supply green steel to buyers that are already demanding it,” Ramirez said.

“The remaining pieces to sort out would be on the permitting side of things and making sure there is access to this large clean electricity and clean hydrogen supply…That’s going to be the critical piece of it, given the scale of what’s going to be needed to run these facilities.”

How new clean-energy tech can help eliminate steel-industry emissions

The pollution-heavy steelmaking process must drastically reduce emissions to help combat the climate crisis. “Green steel” technologies aim to help.

Grace Donnelly

More American households are opting for solar, but most big companies can’t meet their electricity needs by simply throwing some panels on the roof.

Large corporations seeking to ditch carbon-based electricity have been a significant driving force behind the growth in US solar capacity. Companies adding solar to help power their business operations account for 

 in the US, according to a November report from the 

Massive tech and retail companies, from Walmart to Apple, have led this push as they take steps to meet their own net-zero goals. Meta was the largest corporate solar user as of June 2022, with nearly 3.6 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity, according to the report.

For Microsoft, the fifth-biggest corporate solar user in the US, according to the report, this is only the beginning, according to Brian Janous, GM of energy and renewables at the company. Solar makes up a growing portion of Microsoft’s renewable energy purchases, and Janous said he expects it will likely be about half of the company’s energy mix by 2025.

Microsoft had ~550 MW of installed solar capacity in June of last year according to the SEIA; in 2021, the company reported that the power purchase agreements already in place would bring its total renewable energy to ~8 GW as new projects come online, according to its 

The company likely won’t release full numbers for 2022 until later this quarter, but “our pace has not slowed,” Janous told Emerging Tech Brew in December during a conversation about Microsoft’s solar strategy.

“We’re continuing to do a lot of transactions, expanding our footprint more globally to keep pace with the growth of our data-center footprint globally,” he said.

Because of the amount of electricity required to power things like data centers, tech companies tend to consume more energy than on-site rooftop solar panels can provide, Janous said.

That’s why some companies like Microsoft have turned to power purchase agreements (or PPAs), which are contracts between a developer who designs, installs, and operates a solar energy system for a customer that agrees to purchase the power generated from the site over a long period, typically between 10 and 25 years.

“Solar installations are usually—rooftop, at least—measured in kilowatts, or maybe a couple of megawatts. But we’re doing several gigawatts a year, and so our focus has almost entirely been on utility-scale installations,” he told us, adding, “We’re already one of the largest buyers of renewable energy in the world. Our growth is such that we will continue to be one of the largest buyers of renewable energy in the world for the foreseeable future. It will rival that of a lot of electric utilities in terms of their overall procurement, development of these things.”

Microsoft has signed agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase solar power and other renewable energy “over a 10, 15, 20 year period,” he said, though he declined to share specific deal terms.

There were nearly 19 GW of installed US solar projects with commercial off-takers as of June 2022—and 

 of that capacity has been added since 2020, according to the report.

“Solar really has come into its own in the last few years,” Janous said. “If I go back three or four years, the majority of what we were doing was wind. Solar was still sort of coming down that learning curve, from a cost standpoint. And then, really, about two years ago, it started to just flip. And suddenly, we started doing a lot more solar transactions.”

Nearly 27 GW of off-site solar projects with “corporate off-takers” are set to come online by 2025, meaning the total solar capacity installed for commercial use is expected to double again over the next two years, according to the SEIA report.

By that time, Microsoft is aiming to use 100% net annual renewable energy—meaning that the company would be buying enough electricity from renewable sources to cover all the energy it uses in a year, Janous said.

“When we announce our volumes for [2022], what we have contracted will largely be sufficient to achieve our 2025 goal,” he said.

The high price of electricity today has also helped to accelerate solar adoption as companies evaluate the cost of different types of energy, he added.

“At the end of the day, you’re going to buy energy,” Janous said. “We’ve entered a period where the cost of entering into a long-term power purchase agreement is actually quite favorable relative to buying in the market. I would have not said that a couple of years ago.”