Electric Era, a Seattle-based EV charging company known for using batteries to push sites beyond their grid limits, is leveraging its existing technology to help data centers get more power capacity without waiting on the grid.
Announced today, the capacity-as-a-service product involves installing behind-the-meter battery systems controlled by Electric Era’s energy management software, augmenting a site’s grid connection. Electric Era will own and operate the batteries, power conversion equipment, and medium-voltage transformers, and handle the development, permitting, and utility interconnection. It will then manage operation of the batteries via a subscription model.
The new offering, dubbed “CoPower,” lands in an already crowded field of startups competing to help data centers get capacity online sooner via new generation, storage, or flexibility behind the meter. But Electric Era CEO Quincy Lee sees CoPower as complementary to options like gas turbines, fuel cells, behind-the-meter solar, and the small modular reactor concepts that developers are exploring.
“Fundamentally batteries aren’t an energy source; they’re an energy buffer,” he said. Most types of generation that data centers could install behind the meter are either unreliable, have long lead times, or can’t ramp quickly enough to match AI workload swings. A high-power battery system, Lee explained, can smooth the gap between supply and load.
Lee also draws a distinction between CoPower’s approach and software-only data center flexibility offerings that throttle compute loads in response to grid signals. Lee was blunt about the limits of the latter model for paying customers. “Data centers aren’t going to turn off. Nobody’s going to just throttle down and be like, ‘okay, see you later, we’re going to not use our super expensive GB300 racks for five hours,'” he said. “They’d much rather have load flexibility with an onsite generation source or energy buffer.”
Notably, Electric Era isn’t targeting the hyperscalers with its new offering. Instead, the company is focused on edge data centers, anywhere from five to 100 megawatts in size, including neocloud data centers, colocation facilities, and single-tenant developers serving low-latency workloads like real-time AI inference, content delivery, and other applications that can’t be queued or shifted in time.
That workload profile is central to CoPower’s design, Lee explained. Latency-sensitive applications have “spiky and intermittent” load curves, with peaks that last for a handful of hours during the day. Rather than provisioning a grid connection to cover that peak, CoPower enables a developer to size the interconnection to the site’s average load, and let the battery handle the surges. The batteries will charge during off-peak periods when power is cheaper, then discharge during four- to eight-hour periods to increase usable capacity without increasing the interconnection.
“Most data centers think of batteries as a solution to curtail beneath what your allotted grid capacity is,” explained Electric Era CEO Quincy Lee. “We turn the problem on its head and say, why don’t we use the battery to go above the grid limit to maximize the amount of compute and revenue that that facility can make?”
Deployment plans
To launch CoPower, Electric Era secured $50 million in project financing from Australian multinational investment banking group Macquarie, and is leveraging an LFP battery supply partnership with LG Energy. That financing Macquarie will cover roughly 50 megawatts of capacity, Lee explained.
On average across Electric Era’s current pipeline, he said, the configuration delivers about a 25% uplift in usable capacity behind the meter. While the company hasn’t publicly announced any customers yet, deals are already in the works; Lee cited one 76-MW IT-load facility that is leveraging CoPower’s battery buffer to reach roughly 90 MW of capacity during peak workloads.
The core of CoPower’s offering isn’t new; it’s the energy management and fleet operations software that Electric Era originally built to run its network of battery-backed EV charging stations — technology designed to push sites above local grid limits. The company was founded in 2020, and has spent the last several years building battery-backed EV fast-charging stations designed to augment a site’s grid connection. To date, Electric Era has deployed its battery-buffered chargers for customers across 16 states, Lee said.
Electric Era isn’t walking away from its EV charging business, Lee clarified. Instead, the company is splitting into dedicated teams to continue scaling its fast-charging network and building CoPower simultaneously.
