British-based Moixa has been acquired by a new home electrification business backed by Sunrun, one of the largest residential installers of solar in the US.
Sunrun is an investor, along with South Korea’s SK Group into Lunar Energy, which aims to offer homeowners a suite of smart electrification and low carbon distributed energy resource (DER) technologies, beginning with home battery storage.
With Lunar Energy having acquired Moixa, existing investors in the UK company, carmaker Honda and Japanese conglomerate ITOCHU have also become investors in Lunar Energy. Lunar has already raised US$300 million funding since August 2020 and is now emerging from ‘stealth mode,’ Sunrun said today.
Moixa, developer of an innovative virtual power plant (VPP) software, will now play a central role in the development of Lunar Energy’s Lunar GridShare product, which could allow home batteries to be deployed at scale across the US and Japan.
Moixa’s GridShare software integrates data from a household with that from the wider environment, such as energy prices, demand and the weather, to optimise energy storage and EV charging.
The GridShare product will now be incorporated into Lunar Energy’s innovative technology aiming to electrify all homes and connect communities to form clean, resilient virtual power plants.
“More than ever, we need rapid adoption of renewable energy solutions across all sectors to mitigate climate change. Lunar Energy was founded to build affordable hardware and software products for the residential sector to help homeowners generate, store and consume 100% clean energy and remove the usage of fossil fuels from every home,” said Kunal Girotra, founder and CEO of Lunar Energy.
“The first offering of our product ecosystem is a next-generation home battery system. It’s the first step towards our mission to electrify all homes and connect communities to form clean, resilient virtual power plants—freeing us from power outages, rising energy costs and harmful emissions.”
Via ITOCHU, GridShare is said to have been deployed across 35,000 homes in Japan contributing to the green electrification and optimisation of residential areas around the globe, onboarded in around 330MWh of home battery systems.
In 2020, Moixa received £4.6 million of investment from the ITOCHU Corporation in order to further expand GridShare, in Japan, the UK, mainland Europe and the US, as well as aiding its new smart charging partnership with Honda.
“From our early patents in smart homes to managing the world’s largest single fleet of home batteries, our Gridshare software has led the industry for more than 10 years and significantly advanced smart home charging,” said Simon Daniel, CEO and co-founder of Moixa.
“In joining Lunar Energy, we have the exciting opportunity to pursue even greater scale for Gridshare by aggregating larger fleets of batteries across the world to better manage clean energy intelligently for homeowners and businesses.”
In relation to electrical vehicles, GridShare autonomously selects the most cost-effective times to charge a vehicle based on dynamic price changes of the tariff, while also ensuring the car is adequately charged when needed by allowing drivers to input when their vehicle is available to charge and when they need it ready by.
Moixa teamed up with Honda last year for the launch of e:PROGRESS, an intelligent home electric vehicle (EV) charging offer using Moixa’s GridShare technology.
This article has been amended from its original form to clarify that Moixa has been acquired by Lunar Energy, not by Sunrun alone, as was previously implied.