A local energy storage startup aims to grow its team in Houston with its new $6 million in Series A funding.
Revterra Corp. plans to hire employees in electrical, mechanical and manufacturing engineering to develop the company's energy storage technology. The company also aims to build out a larger facility for assembly, testing and quality control on its kinetic storage modules. The firm currently has space at clean energy and climate technology accelerator Greentown Labs, which opened in Midtown last year.
Unlike many storage developers investing in lithium-ion batteries, Revterra thinks flywheel energy storage will play a growing role in the energy storage mix.
Flywheel energy storage has been around for a long time, but Revterra says its proprietary magnetic-bearing technology can reduce wear and tear and boost efficiency.
The company's first target market is electric vehicle charging. Revterra CEO Ben Jawdat said the firm's first storage modules should support one 350-kilowatt fast EV charger.
"We can use a stationary battery at the EV charging station to charge at low power and then discharge to high power," Jawdat said.
Lithium-ion battery storage is playing a bigger role in providing utility-scale power generation and services for grid reliability. There is also increasing demand for lithium-ion battery cells in manufacturing EVs for drivers.
With high demand for lithium-ion batteries in the large-scale storage and EV markets, Revterra thinks the fast EV charging space presents opportunity for kinetic energy storage.
"We really do think there are going to be some constraints with the availability of lithium-ion batteries for stationary applications," Jawdat said. "Not only do we need batteries on the cars, we need them at the stations and we need them on the grid scale."
There are thousands of megawatts of utility-scale battery energy storage projects in various stages of development on the Texas grid, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state's power grid.
