The electrical grid has changed more in the last decade than in the preceding five. Solar, wind, and batteries have pushed power generation away from monolithic producers. But fundamentally, the grid still suffers from the same challenges.
“The problem on the grid is a peak problem. Most of the time you’re okay, you have plenty of power. But in those peak hours you might not have enough,” Michael Phelan, co-founder and CEO of GridBeyond, told TechCrunch.
Today, those shortages are most acutely felt by tech companies and data center developers, which need large amounts of electricity to train and operate AI models.
“But if you have enough energy stored in a battery or you have an industrial load you can turn down — and it’s hundreds of megawatts — then you can start building those hyperscalers,” Phelan said.
GridBeyond has been building hardware and software to stitch together disparate parts of the grid to behave as larger virtual power plants. The startup already manages around 1 gigawatt of solar, batteries, wind, and hydropower, and on the demand side, it has “several gigawatts” across commercial and industrial facilities, Phelan said.
To expand its portfolio, GridBeyond recently raised a €12 million ($13.8 million) equity round led by Samsung Ventures, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Other participating investors include ABB, Act Venture Capital, Alantra’s Energy Transition Fund, Constellation, EDP, Energy Impact Partners, Enterprise Ireland, Klima, Mirova, and Japanese electronics and software company Yokogawa.
The startup has its hardware controllers installed in batteries and renewable power plants along with large commercial and industrial facilities in Australia, Ireland, Japan, Ireland, the U.K., and the United States.
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Like many virtual power plant companies, Dublin-headquartered GridBeyond got its start on an island. As Ireland began adding wind power, Phelan said, “they hit this problem where they were an island and they had to balance the grid. So it was very suitable for them to have things like flexible load that they could put into the market.”
Grid operators have long asked heavy users to curtail their power use during extreme heat waves. For example, paying users handsomely to shave peaks off demand. The practice is cheaper than building new transmission lines or power plants. The practice has expanded as renewables have surged, allowing industrial and commercial customers to reduce usage at night or when the wind dies down.
More recently, batteries have added a new dimension. GridBeyond manages several large energy storage installations, including a 200-megawatt battery in California. The new source of flexible supply helps fill dips from renewable power.
Batteries have another advantage: They’re far quicker at responding to demand than traditional peaking power plants, which can take minutes to come online. That allows the company to buy and sell power rapidly in a form of arbitrage.
It also opens up new possibilities for data centers. Many data centers don’t draw power continuously, instead peaking during AI training. These events can cause oscillations on the grid — “you know the thing that collapsed the Spanish grid, which is not what people want,” Phelan said. Batteries located at data centers can absorb much of this load, smoothing out the facility’s profile on the grid so it doesn’t cause unwanted fluctuations.
By plugging into a nearby virtual power plant or by using batteries installed on site, “it’s easier obviously for them to get connection,” he said.
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