Energy management solutions provider GridBeyond has raised investment to extend its capabilities for “robotic” trading of energy assets and expand internationally, the company’s CEO has said.
The Ireland-headquartered company announced today that it has closed a €52 million (£44.43 million) Series C funding round, with participation from investors including Energy Impact Partners in the US, Japan’s Yokogawa Electric and Swiss multinational automation hardware company ABB.
GridBeyond uses its artificial intelligence (AI) software to optimise the participation of distributed and front-of-the-meter (FTM) energy assets, including commercial and industrial (C&I) energy storage and demand response, grid-scale storage, and other technologies, in available market opportunities.
That means accessing wholesale markets for day-ahead, intraday, imbalance, frequency regulation and any local distribution system operator (DSO) markets, said CEO Michael Phelan, who spoke with sister site Energy-Storage.news earlier today.
At the same time, for customers that want to maximise their involvement in the energy transition away from fossil fuels through corporate renewable energy power purchase agreements (PPAs) with 24/7 power matching, the GridBeyond platform is used to capture surplus solar or wind power, store it in the battery and then use it at the best time from an economic perspective.
In other words, any clean energy asset that can be optimised for revenue and carbon footprint can be connected to the platform, which the company has been developing since 2010. GridBeyond has more than 2,600MW of assets under management, including more than 500MW of battery storage.
“Using software with human oversight” is the company’s approach, Phelan said.
A significant portion of the funds raised will be “targeted at the use of AI for energy storage, energy flexibility and the energy transition,” while the rest will help further GridBeyond’s international expansion.
The company is present in markets in the UK and Ireland, where Phelan claimed it is perhaps the biggest aggregator of distributed-scale storage systems below the 50MW mark, and ramped up its push into deregulated US energy markets, such as ERCOT in Texas, during 2023.
The financing, which was led by Klima, the energy transition fund of financial services group Alantra, will help further enhance GridBeyond’s product, described as a Grid Edge Virtual Power Plant solution, so that it can be adapted for all opportunities in the markets it operates in.
ABB’s minority investment is a strategic one, the automation company said in a release of its own today, that will enable its customers to optimise their distributed energy resources and industrial loads through GridBeyond’s AI and data science-backed energy management solutions.
To read the full version of this story, visit Energy-Storage.news.
