Durham battery storage firm FlexGen raises $150M to speed up grid transition
FlexGen Power Systems, a Durham-based company that makes solutions for battery storage, a pivotal technology for making energy grids more green, has raised a $150 million equity commitment from investors, including from private-equity giant Apollo Global Management.
The fundraise, one of the largest in North Carolina this year, will be used to hire more employees and increase research and development, as it tries to keep up with booming demand for battery storage, FlexGen CEO Kelcy Pegler said in an interview with The News & Observer.
“Demand is really exploding” right now for battery storage, Pegler said. Battery storage is critical for storing power from alternative energy sources, like wind and solar energy, so that power grids can store the energy more efficiently and send out to customers when it is needed.
“The infrastructure of our grid has been built to the available technologies of the time, and for a long time, the power sources were coal and other natural resources,” Pegler said. “Battery storage, quite literally, sits at the intersection of this great transition, where we’re able to take variable power sources, like solar and wind, and store their power and make it available for deployment, whenever we need it.”
FlexGen, founded in 2009, builds software that helps grids manage energy storage. The company has around 60 employees, most of whom work at its office near Research Triangle Park in southern Durham.
Pegler said the new money will help hire “several dozen” more employees in the coming months. It also plans to expand its lab space at its office to test new products.
The Triangle’s talent mix sits “right in-between the hardware that is the battery storage system and the software that enables it to perform optimally,” Pegler said of the benefits of recruiting from the Triangle. “And I don’t know that there’s a better ZIP code in the country (for that) than the Durham location.”
That sentiment is similar to one Peter Wells, the CEO of power technology company Smart Wires, gave for his decision to move his company’s headquarters from California’s Bay Area to Durham.
“There are other (power) companies here, like Hitachi ABB,” Wells said of the Triangle in an interview with The N&O. And “N.C. State works very well in (this field). Duke has a really good electrical engineering program. There are other colleges around, and Georgia Tech’s not that far away. I mean there’s a lot of stuff in the area.”
Since FlexGen was founded in 2009, officials say it has supported the deployment of more than 1.2 gigawatt hours of energy storage systems around the world — the equivalent of more than 3 million photovoltaic solar panels, according to the Department of Energy.
The company is not releasing revenue numbers, but Apollo Global Management said in a statement that it sees serious tailwinds for the company, as battery storage investments pick up over the next decade.
“This transition to renewable power is happening at a time where reliability and resiliency are more important than ever for the grid in the face of increasing extreme weather events,” Olivia Wassenaar, senior partner at Apollo, said in a statement. “FlexGen’s energy storage solutions bridge the gap of reliability for the grid and help accelerate the adoption of renewables by shifting renewable power consumption to times when it is needed most.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
This story was originally published August 30, 2021 at 4:37 PM with the headline "Durham battery storage firm FlexGen raises $150M to speed up grid transition."
