Santa Monica-based Swell Energy, which is assembling networks of solar rooftop and battery customers into virtual power plants, announced last week that it had raised $120 million in equity financing, bringing its total equity capitalization to $152 million.
The series B fund raise, announced on Nov. 22, was led by a tech fund overseen by Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. and a development opportunities fund overseen by New York-based Greenbacker Capital Management. The raise had participation from an infrastructure opportunities fund overseen by Century City-based Ares Management Corp. and a pension fund overseen by Toronto-based Ontario Power Generation Inc.
Swell Energy plans to use the $120 million it raised to further build out its virtual power plant programs. These are aggregations of solar rooftop and battery customers into networks that Swell Energy, through its software platform, can coordinate into releasing power back onto the electricity grid at critical times.
The $120 million is expected to fund the deployment and aggregation of 26,000 separate rooftop solar energy storage systems throughout the U.S. to collectively generate 600 megawatt hours of electricity that can be put back onto the transmission grid. Swell has been developing virtual power plant networks in Orange County, Santa Barbara/Ventura counties, the Hawaiian islands of Maui, Oahu and Hawaii, as well as the New York metropolitan area, among other locations.
These virtual power plants are viewed as critical in California, where, on hot days, the state’s grid faces electricity shortfalls during the early evening hours, after solar generation winds down.
