Moxion, a US company making mobile battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions, has closed a Series B round with investors including funds held by Amazon and Microsoft.
The company said this week that it has secured US$100 million from the funding round and at the same time announced a multi-year customer deal with equipment and tools rental group Sunbelt Rentals. Sunbelt will buy Moxion systems up to 2025.
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It signifies a significant scale-up from Moxion’s 2021 Series A round which raised US$10 million from investors including noted sustainable infrastructure investor Energy Impact Partners, which participated in latest round too.
Moxion is one of a growing number of companies packaging up and integrating BESS on wheels, units that can be taken to construction sites or other facilities that require a temporary power solution.
That could also mean film location sets, utility maintenance and network upgrade sites, electric vehicle (EV) fleet management and other applications. For example, one Series B investor is the venture capital (VC) arm of car rental group Enterprise Holdings.
“Our operations require access to safe and sufficient power while minimising business disruption. Mobile charging and battery storage offers the flexible solution we’ll need, and we are excited to be a part of the next leg in Moxion’s journey,” Enterprise Holdings VP of strategy development Chris Haffenraffer said.
Haffenraffer added that with Enterprise growing its fleet of EVs, Enterprise Venture Holdings’ investment in Moxion “supports key infrastructure that needs to be in place”.
The rented mobile units can replace the legacy role of fossil fuel generators, reducing air and noise pollution as well as reducing emissions and the reliance on liquid fuel supply.
Moxion calls its business model “power-as-a-service”. Its website offers the barest of details on its products and their configurations at present, but the company is constructing its first manufacturing facility, in Richmond, California.
Planning to construct and open a second factory in 2024, Moxion is targeting 7GWh of annual production capacity.
Other companies with mobile BESS solutions include Greener Power Solutions from the Netherlands which raised €45 million (US$44.29 million) this year from asset manager DIF Capital Partners. Back in 2019 Greener Power Solutions co-founder Dieter Castelein wrote a technical paper for our quarterly journal PV Tech Power on a case study of using mobile BESS to support grid maintenance.
Another interesting project the company did was with a Dutch wind farm operator, where BESS units were charged at wind power plant sites and then transported to sites where the power was needed.
Greener is an integrator and to date has used mobile BESS manufactured by another Dutch company, Alfen, but this year said it is trying out solutions made by Northvolt, the Swedish startup building battery and energy storage system gigafactories in Europe.
A few weeks ago, US-headquartered battery and BESS manufacturer KORE Power unveiled the first product range for its mobile BESS subsidiary, Nomad Transportable Power Systems, offering three units ranging from 660kWh up to 2MWh capacity.
Moxion’s Series B was led by VC firm Tamarack Global. As well as Energy Impact Partners, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Enterprise, Marubeni Ventures, Sunbelt Rentals and two other investors took part.
“Moxion’s technology fills an important need in our power management solutions lineup, whether augmenting or replacing fossil-fuel-powered generators. Increasingly, our customers are looking for cleaner options for their temporary power needs,” Sunbelt Rentals CEO Brendan Horgan said.
“We look forward to working with the team as they continue to build domestic manufacturing operations, create jobs, and unlock and decarbonise new market verticals,” Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund director Brandon Middaugh said.
