Hardware Podcasts

The commercial battery comeback

Catalyst · 30 Jul 2026 · 44m

AI in practice: one real use of AI described

What this episode covers

Tim Hade, senior vice president at Voltus and founder of Brightfield Infrastructure, explains why commercial and industrial (C&I) battery storage has historically lagged behind residential and utility-scale markets due to unattractive economics and high transaction costs. He details how four revenue streams—time-of-use arbitrage, demand charge management, ancillary services, and capacity markets—are now making C&I storage viable, driven by rising electricity prices and grid constraints. Hade highlights that battery hardware costs have fallen by roughly 30-40% in 18 months, while AI-powered automation is projected to reduce transaction costs by up to 90%, making the business case compelling for commercial customers. Finally, he discusses how aggregating thousands of distributed batteries into virtual power plants (VPPs) enables hyperscalers to secure capacity for data centers through 'bring your own capacity' programs, accelerating adoption in constrained grids like PJM.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Engineering & simulationagentic toolstransaction costs reduced from $200/kWh to $25–$50/kWh

AI agents were used to automate repetitive transaction workflows like financial modeling and contract writing, reducing transaction costs from $200/kWh to $25–$50/kWh.

“you can actually train agents to do those repetitive workflows and that drops your transaction costs significantly. And so a lot of the projects we're doing today were it used to cost us $200 a kilowatt hour to do that transaction cost bucket. We're currently doing for $25 to $50 a kilowatt hour.”

Speaker 4 · Hear it at 31:26

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Voltus, Brightfield Infrastructure, Energy Impact Partners, SunPower, Powerlight, Next Tracker, STEM, Green Charge, AMS, Solectro, SunGrow
Also
PJM, Ercot, Kaiso, California, SE, Alisto Canyon, IRA, OBB

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