Moment Energy CEO Edward Chiang believes the demand for energy in North America is infinite — and that his startup has the solution.
The company, which has headquarters in Canada and the United States, is taking a new approach to reusing electric vehicle batteries, Chiang told TechCrunch. The company’s approach is special, he said, because of its dual focus on security and modularity.
Investors apparently agree. On Tuesday, Moment Energy announced that it had raised a $40 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to more than $100 million. The round was led by Canadian VC firm Evok Innovations, with additional funding from grocery retailer fund W23, joining existing investors such as Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and CIA-backed VC firm In-Q-Tel.
In Chiang’s view, the power grid in North America is in a losing race to meet this demand for power, due to an increasingly extreme climate, the rise of electric vehicles and the data center explosion. So far, he says, most Chinese companies have met that demand – about 72% of the global market, according to BNEF — adding a national security wrinkle to the picture.
Moment Energy is tackling this by taking battery packs from electric vehicles, hacking the automakers’ battery management systems, and writing its own software to manage the packs. It then packages the battery modules into larger grid-scale storage solutions that can accommodate a broad mix of battery chemistries, allowing customers to take advantage of future technology advances while reducing downtime if a particular module fails.
Most importantly, Chiang said, Moment Energy does all this with UL Certification, making it the first company to reuse batteries with the safety agency’s seal of approval.
Chiang said other companies working to reuse EV batteries for long-term storage often claim to test their products to UL certification standards, but don’t actually receive the certifications, which require the use of certain components.
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“What more other second lives [battery] companies are now trying to say it’s, let’s lobby to make second-life UL certification easier, because it’s impossible to get UL certification as it is,” he said. “But right now, we’re saying that’s not true. We got it.”
UL certification may sound boring, but Chiang said it can make a difference not only in terms of safety, but also how these energy storage products are secured.
He claimed (without naming them) that other energy storage companies will leave an automaker’s battery management system at the mercy of reused batteries and essentially trick the pack into thinking it’s still on track to convince the right amount of discharge.
That could make these storage solutions either uninsurable or too expensive to insure, Chiang said. He pointed to Liberty Mutual’s venture arm participating in Moment Energy’s Series B as evidence that his company’s solution is above board.
“Maybe as engineers or as consumers, we think this is kind of interesting,” he said. “Actually, fire inspectors don’t think it’s interesting. Automakers don’t think it’s interesting. You can imagine if — I really hope it never happens — but if a battery catches fire, the fire inspector will say, ‘Oh, hey, there’s a Tesla battery management system here, or there’s a Nissan battery management system here, and the automaker will never say ‘and the automaker’ violated my safety systems.”
Chiang’s confidence seems to come from many places. Despite being small — Chiang said Moment Energy has about 72 employees — the company has signed supply deals with Mercedes-Benz and Nissan. He secured a $20 million loan from the Department of Energy. And it’s building a gigawatt-scale plant in Austin, Texas.
Moment also has a growing book of diverse clients, from utilities to industrial companies and — yes — data centers.
But Chiang said he also believes much of Moment Energy’s approach comes from being a Canadian company at heart, removed from some of Silicon Valley’s more base impulses.
While Chiang said that “all the data center companies have contacted us,” he also emphasized that his company did not want to fall into the trap of raising resources against promises that cannot be fulfilled.
“What we’re really thinking about overall is staying focused overall on what we know and what we’re building, and serving real customers, rather than trying to sign deals that are five or 10 years down the road just to raise capital. And unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of Bay Area startups trying less to deliver product, but trying to make the next round.”
“But for us, I think because we had our roots in Canada, a lot of Canadian companies are focused on building a tangible business and a real, profitable business, as well as a high-growth business, and we’re pretty realistic about growth.”
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