Photo credit: Electric Era
Electric Era, a Seattle-based EV charging company known for using batteries to push sites beyond their grid limits, is leveraging its existing technology to help data centers get more power capacity without waiting on the grid.
Announced today, the capacity-as-a-service product involves installing behind-the-meter battery systems controlled by Electric Era’s energy management software, augmenting a site’s grid connection. Electric Era will own and operate the batteries, power conversion equipment, and medium-voltage transformers, and handle the development, permitting, and utility interconnection. It will then manage operation of the batteries via a subscription model.
The new offering, dubbed “CoPower,” lands in an already crowded field of startups competing to help data centers get capacity online sooner via new generation, storage, or flexibility behind the meter. But Electric Era CEO Quincy Lee sees CoPower as complementary to options like gas turbines, fuel cells, behind-the-meter solar, and the small modular reactor concepts that developers are exploring.
“Fundamentally batteries aren’t an energy source; they’re an energy buffer,” he said. Most types of generation that data centers could install behind the meter are either unreliable, have long lead times, or can’t ramp quickly enough to match AI workload swings. A high-power battery system, Lee explained, can smooth the gap between supply and load.
