Energy storage startup Powin Energy has raised more than $100 million in equity investment to compete with better-funded rivals in the large-scale grid battery market.
Powin buys battery cells and hooks them up with proprietary software controls and ancillary equipment to produce full-fledged power plants. It competes in the upper echelons of the energy storage integration market with the likes of Tesla, Fluence and Wärtsilä.
But those competitors are storage businesses nestled within billion-dollar, publicly traded enterprises. Powin is a bootstrapped company based amid the evergreens of Tualatin, Oregon that managed to build some 600 megawatt-hours of storage on its own.