A clean grid will need a lot of batteries to balance out the ups and downs of solar and wind power. Today, those batteries tend to come in two forms. The first is utility-scale battery farms that take up acres of land and cost up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The second is lots of little batteries tucked into garages and basements that can provide backup power when needed, plus share some of their stored energy with the grid at large.
Startup NineDot Energy is working on a third, medium-sized option — “community-scale battery storage” projects that can fit into less than an acre of open land or building space. The company’s first target: the crowded urban landscape of New York City, where utility-scale batteries are hard to build and batteries inside buildings are hard to finance.
This month, NineDot Energy raised $225 million in equity capital from new investor Manulife Investment Management and previous investor Carlyle, the private-equity firm that provided the startup with $100 million in financing in early 2022. NineDot used that initial tranche of funding to build its first project, a 3-megawatt/12-megawatt-hour battery and solar installation built on a 7,500-square-foot former parking lot in the Pelham Gardens neighborhood of the Bronx.
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