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Matthew Zeitlin talks with the New Jersey leader at Heatmap House at New York Climate Week.
Controlled Thermal Resources has completed key financial steps ahead of its planned Nasdaq debut.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act would remove longstanding roadblocks to expanding the power grid and developing new energy infrastructure. Here’s our guide.
Novele is aiming to smooth out power consumption for commercial buildings, saving tenants money and easing grid strain.
Electricity is more expensive in times of peak demand — that’s simply a universal truth. But for many commercial building owners and tenants, their most energy-intensive minutes of the month can have an especially outsized impact on their electricity bill. That’s because of the “demand charge,” a fee based on a building’s single highest burst of power consumption, which can make up over 50% of a customer’s monthly bill. Likewise, shrinking those bursts would not only ease strain on the grid, but could also dramatically lower commercial users’ costs.
Or at least that’s Novele’s pitch. The startup, which makes 2-inch-thick, fire-safe lithium-ion batteries that mount on the interior walls of commercial spaces such as offices, hospitals, and big box retailers, announced Wednesday that it raised an oversubscribed $17 million Series A led by impact-focused investor Boisei Labs. The funding will help the company scale its AI-powered battery system, which networks batteries placed throughout a building and uses software to predict impending spikes in power demand. Just before the peak hits, the system can automatically switch the building from grid power to battery power, helping the customer avoid those costly demand charges.
“We learn how the building consumes power, but we’re also taking into account other considerations, like what day of the week it is, how the building is occupied, when it’s being used, what’s happening with the weather conditions,” Novele’s co-founder and CEO Charles Conwell told me.
Of course, battery storage for commercial customers is nothing new. Tesla, for one, has long sold large batteries like its Megapack, along with software designed to help businesses manage and reduce peak demand. But unlike these larger outdoor systems, Novele designed its thin panels for installation inside occupied spaces like hospital hallways and offices, distributing the batteries throughout a building while operating them as a single, coordinated system.
The systems are custom designed, so Novele told me it couldn’t provide an overall cost estimate. But Conwell told me the batteries typically have a 20- to 40-month payback period, the timeframe in which a customer’s electricity bill savings should eclipse the system’s upfront cost. (The company also offers financing options that allow customers to spread out that cost over time.) And while customers may sign up for the cost savings, there are major decarbonization benefits, too. So-called peak-shaving can reduce the need for peaker plants — natural gas facilities that only fire up when demand is highest. These plants are typically among the grid’s most carbon-intensive assets, as they’re designed to ramp up quickly rather than operate efficiently for long periods.
These automated batteries could also enable commercial buildings to participate in virtual power plant programs, which ease strain on the grid by cutting energy use during periods of high demand or by tapping assets like batteries to send power back to the grid. Using stored energy when needed, Conwell explained, is better than typical demand response initiatives, which often require tenants to change their routines — e.g. when they run the dishwasher or charge an EV — to accommodate the grid. That approach, he said, is either “ineffective or doesn’t make the tenants very happy.”
As the company scales, it also envisions building a portfolio of properties that, if they have “a dense enough footprint,” could work in concert to form their own virtual power plant of sorts, Conwell said.
In the near term, however, Novele plans to use its Series A to expand its team, install more systems, and further develop its software. It’s particularly focused on markets where electricity costs are already high or climbing fast, such as California, New York, New England, and parts of the PJM power market. In PJM in particular, record-high capacity prices — largely driven by data center demand — are pushing electricity bills to new heights.
The company says it has already installed batteries for several Fortune 50 customers, though it’s keeping the identities of these early adopters under wraps. Conwell told me that there’s also “a bunch of installations that are in progress,” and that in the coming year, the company will be working toward making the process of purchasing, installing, and operating Novele’s system as seamless as possible.
Once that foundation is in place, Conwell sees an opportunity to help usher in a more responsive, intelligent future for the built environment. “If you get the infrastructure right, if you bring in the controls — the mechanical controls, the machine learning controls, and the artificial intelligence-driven controls — you start to be able to set the stage for a dynamic, autonomous building of the future.”
Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway, seem to be returning to normal.
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For the first decade of my professional career, the U.S. economy was defined largely by its deficiencies. Employment lagged for years after the Great Recession, especially for non-college-educated men in their prime earning years. Money was free or cheap to borrow. Even after the housing market had recovered, economic activity remained moribund.
Americans hated it, and politicians proposed various schemes to backfill the gap. One of these ideas was the Green New Deal — a once-in-a-generation investment in clean energy and low-carbon infrastructure that would put Americans back to work and deploy the economy’s spare capacity for the public good.
How things have changed: The main story of the American economy today is one of constraints. On Tuesday, yields on 30-year Treasury bonds reached their highest level since 2002, meaning the federal government’s long-term borrowing costs are higher than they’ve been at any point since I was in elementary school. Electricity demand is surging, and global stockpiles of gasoline, diesel fuel, and crude oil are in short supply. No wonder, then, that many of the inputs to the energy system — such as transformers or natural gas turbines — remain expensive or in short supply. Or that the inflation rate remains stuck higher than 3%.
What’s funny is that Americans still hate it. Consumer confidence fell last month to its lowest level since 2014, according to new Conference Board data released on Tuesday. You can chock that up to oil prices, which have climbed since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in March. But there’s a deeper mystery going on, too — the economy is picking up, hiring is increasing, and the U.S. is experiencing a physical investment boom of a scale not seen in decades.
It’s not what I would have predicted back in the 2010s. Talking to a fellow policy nerd at a Climate Week event in New York on Thursday, we joked that we all owe an apology to Boomer politicians, who had once seemed inordinately obsessed with the 1970s. It turns out that Americans really do despise inflation above all else, even when it accompanies robust economic growth.
On that front, there are two interesting developments. The first is that America is seemingly succeeding in its battle to wrench the Strait of Hormuz back open in its ongoing war with Iran.
In recent days, more than 10 million barrels of oil have exited the Strait of Hormuz on tankers accompanied by U.S. Navy ships, according to the ship tracking data provider Kpler. Another 6 million barrels have left through other routes. Last year, about 20 million barrels of crude oil were shipped through the strait each day, according to the International Energy Agency.
That could eventually help lower some fossil fuel costs — at enormous cost, of course, to the American public — but it will not happen quickly. Global refinery capacity remains constrained, and future diesel prices are much higher now than they were when the war began. This means diesel prices could likely stay stubbornly high for some time, helping China’s effort to electrify its heavy-duty truck fleet and even providing some tailwind for Tesla’s new Semi truck, if it ever gets released.
The second development is that the Senate seems to be moving ahead with permitting reform. The bipartisan team that has been negotiating the deal announced a deal late on Monday (as my colleague Alexander Kaufman detailed in Heatmap AM), and the lawmakers will hold a press conference on Wednesday where they’ll release bill text. Senate leadership seems to be eyeing a vote on the legislation after the midterm election. That bill — if the deal is a good one — could theoretically help grow the power grid, loosen some of the constraints on the clean energy economy, and make it easier to build new kinds of public infrastructure.
But we’ll know more when we see it — and we’ll see it soon. We’ll be covering the deal on Wednesday and, I’m sure, for many weeks to come.
