Lydia and Andrew talk about how we comprehensively solve industrial power problems in recent blog posts. Over the last twelve months, Critical Loop has deployed our Controller, Combiner, and Batteries to a wide range of customers: from factories to EV fleet charging stations to airports. The unifying factor for all of these deployments was that the customer needed high quality power, delivered reliably and quickly.

In a previous career, I had the opportunity to help build critical infrastructure supporting the United States’ spaceflight program. Rocket launch pads sending astronauts to space would sometimes be susceptible to the vagaries of weather. Or a stray balloon taking down a power line. Losing power to the rocket launch pad is bad news when you are in the middle of loading a million pounds of fuel and oxidizer, with astronauts sitting on top. Working on these projects highlighted for me the importance of reliability. Everything breaks. What matters is when and if you are prepared.

Serving the urgent and emergent power needs of the United States’ critical infrastructure is a foundational principle for Critical Loop. There is broad-based awareness of the significance of energy resilience to the robustness of the American economy and national security. Utilities in California talk about building in community resilience in response to recent wildfires. White House executive orders emphasize the importance of increasing access to energy for industrial-scale loads. Our reliance on power is only increasing, with the increasing consumption of power to run data centers that are becoming integral to day-to-day business operations and urban life.

As we began to build Critical Loop, we approached businesses across the country to find what their most acute power problems were. We identified that customers’ priorities spanned three key areas:

• They want their energy infrastructure to work. Business down-time or damage to equipment is unacceptable.

• They want access to power. The missing kilowatt is the most valuable kilowatt.

• They want affordable power. The cost of power and getting access to power on time is rising.

In March 2024, a factory in our very backyard in Southern California reached out to us with an urgent request after a utility fire took out their transformer. For the next six months, we managed power for them using a combination of a battery and a diesel generator, optimizing fuel consumption and power quality, allowing the customer to run complex jobs on CNC machines without worrying about falling behind on production rate. Around the holiday season, during the peak winter delivery season for logistics companies, a customer lost utility power due to issues with their switchgear. We were able to rapidly deploy a microgrid at their facility with less than 24 hours of notice, with two hours of setup time. The charging station ran autonomously off-grid, until the site switchgear issues were resolved.

Critical Loop’s headquarters sits on the campus of an airport. Stepping outside our hangar, you can see commercial flights barreling down the tarmac. Cargo planes ferrying goods land and take-off every hour. And once in a while, you can spot a C-17 on a distant runway. All of this is a very visible representation of how important airports are. Facilities like airports or Air Force Bases consume a lot of electricity. And operations grind to a halt when there is no power.

Solar and low-cost batteries that were installed in the past are beginning to encounter premature end-of-life issues. More dramatically, companies that set these assets up are going out of business, leaving customers in a bind. Such was the predicament of a major international airport. They had megawatt-hours of low-cost energy storage installed, capable of saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by peak shaving. But the project stopped dead in its tracks after commissioning when the company that controlled the batteries went out of business. After a hard fought competition, Critical Loop won a bid to take over management of this key piece of infrastructure.

To win as a small company, we really needed to show the facility management that we knew what we were doing.

• We had to prove that we were able to maximize savings better than the competition, using our peak shaving algorithm that takes advantage of optimizing thresholds based on historical data, battery performance based on chemistry, and ambient conditions. In our minds, this was table stakes.

• We recognized that this was really a reliability challenge. Your peak shaving algorithm is no good if the battery can’t hit all the critical peaks in a month. We demonstrated our team’s deep understanding of battery hardware health management, maintenance, and reliability monitoring. We showed the power of our autonomous control systems, fault management, and remote monitoring capabilities.

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are well-suited to provide critical, high quality backup power and reduce cost for critical infrastructure customers. They can store excess energy during low-demand periods and release it during peak times when demand response events occur. Grid-distributed networks of BESS further stabilizes the grid, reduces reliance on fossil fuel-based peaking plants, and maximizes the use of renewable energy sources. The result is a more resilient grid that can better withstand fluctuations in energy production and consumption, offering both economic and environmental benefits.