When the startup Moxion went under last year, some in the industry lamented the company’s overconfidence. Moxion sold a portable battery, with 75 kilowatts of power and over 600 kilowatt-hours of energy, meant to replace diesel generators for live events, disaster response, construction, and defense applications. The idea gained traction, enabling the company to raise a $100-million Series B in 2022. But it also encouraged too much growth, too fast.
Just over a year after its Series B, the company laid off its staff, leaving behind an enormous office and manufacturing space in Richmond, California. However, even after its collapse, both clients and former employees continued to have faith in the technology — that is, according to one former senior manager “if somebody is able to make it better with much more frugality and much more market validation.”
That’s where Viridi, a battery company based in Buffalo, New York, is looking to step in. Today, Viridi announced its expansion into Moxion’s 40,000-square-foot factory space in Richmond, California, which it purchased at auction for $7 million. The company has secured a $9.3 million grant from the California Energy Commission to get the facility up and running.
From its new position out west, the company is planning to expand its service, manufacturing, research and development, and sales operations from New York to California. CEO Jon Williams sees the state as a key potential market — and despite Moxion’s collapse, Williams is grateful to Viridi’s predecessor.
“Moxion vetted out all the issues in the market that we were able to solve for with our unit,” said Williams, “and really helped us build a better unit, in honesty.”
The portable, behind-the-meter battery space is evolving in real time. Moxion designed a unit to compete with portable generators, one that was light enough to attach to a car or truck, for relatively short-term deployments; meanwhile, Viridi is targeting more fixed applications, and building out technology surrounding the battery that keeps it from causing a fire.
“We designed our pack as an industrial product to go in the building, not as an automotive product to go in a car,” said Williams. “There are disadvantages. Our pack is a lot heavier per kilowatt-hour of energy than Moxion’s was. But you can also hit our pack with a machine and nothing happens to it. You can flip ours over into a ditch, and it’s fine.”
As a result, resilience has been a major part of the company’s pitch — over the flexibility and portability that Moxion favored.
The Viridi pitch
Behind-the-meter storage systems are a small but growing part of the battery market. However, the lithium-ion batteries that are in wide use have a safety problem.
While they aren’t inherently dangerous, certain types can be prone to thermal runaway if damaged or overheated, causing dangerous fires like the one at California’s Moss Landing facility in California. So even as lithium-ion dominates the market market, companies are experimenting with other chemistries. So far, though, none have broken through.
Viridi took a different approach, looking instead to make the proven lithium-ion chemistry, to use their word, fail-safe. The modular system uses anti-propagation technology that essentially shuts down the unit in case of damage to even a single cell. The result is, according to Viridi, the only commercial-scale BESS installed in existing and occupied buildings: industrial, medical, commercial, and municipal.
And demand is increasing, especially in the last six months. After utility-scale battery fires like the one at Moss Landing, as well as smaller fires from home battery systems, Viridi is seeing interest grow.
“Every time one of those fires happen, we get calls that say, ‘Okay, explain the safety thing to me again, I want to know how this works,’” Williams said. “I think the recognition that all these devices need to be safe before anything else is really what’s helping our development.”
The company closed a $95 million Series B in 2022, led by investor B. Thomas Golisano, as well as National Grid Partners and Ashtead Group/Sunbelt Rentals; the latter has also been a major customer, for Viridi as well as Moxion.
Sunbelt actually had a lot of Moxion units still in the field at the time of the company’s bankruptcy, and expressed concerns about whether they’d be able to keep using them. In addition to the facility, Viridi also acquired much of Moxion’s built inventory, intellectual property, and patents; Williams has told its customer-investor that it will use those resources to help maintain Sunbelt’s field inventory of units.
The potential for partnership
Sunbelt actually deployed several of Viridi’s during the Los Angeles fires, Williams told Latitude Media exclusively. A number of the units in Sunbelt’s fleet were already in the LA area, and the company responded to an emergency call for temporary power. They set up hybrid systems, combining Viridi’s battery system with a diesel generator, at places like command centers, canteens, or bathroom facilities during those weeks of fires. It was a demonstration of the pack’s versatility beyond the industrial applications that Viridi initially targeted.
In addition to the CEC grant to build out the Richmond facility, Viridi is also in talks with California about adapting its residential battery system for new homes, Williams said. The existing Viridi home system offers multiples of 50 kilowatt-hours of energy (up to 150 kWh). The system, he added, can run a home for several days, whereas a smaller Tesla pack is suited for several hours.
“We’re talking to California about trying to design a product that would be exterior — kind of look like your kind of look like your air conditioning condenser — but could become part of a design package for permitting, so that as they’re building new homes, you’re building battery storage into that,” Williams said. “You’ll never be in a situation where you don’t have fire pumps, you don’t have fire systems, you don’t have emergency access.
“Even if the power goes out, a battery ensures that all those safety systems, and then sometimes some pumps and other things, are powered. And it also allows the utility to balance load.”
These plans, he caveated, are “very much in the early stages” — but the looming 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, which is planned to be fully electric, is a powerful incentive for the state to move.
