The energy sector is undergoing its most significant transformation in over a century. The world is entering an “Age of Electricity,” powered by the global multi-trillion-dollar shift towards the lowest cost and most scalable watt – solar energy. However, as solar becomes a growing part of our energy mix, its variable nature requires careful planning and advanced technological solutions to ensure a reliable and stable energy supply.
Grid scale batteries are essential to store excess energy and address volatility, and natural gas is poised to fill in many of the baseload and peak supply gaps. It’s being driven by the exponential growth of artificial intelligence, industrial onshoring, and widespread electrification—from vehicles to heating and cooling—creating a structural shift and steeper demand slope. Simultaneously, extreme weather events caused by climate change are becoming more frequent, widespread, and intense. The grid, designed for a different era, is struggling to keep up.
The challenge we face is a complicated one. Electricity prices are becoming increasingly volatile as energy companies attempt to balance reliability, cost, and growth. The promise of a resilient, abundant, low-cost energy future hinges on developing the right mix of assets, market structures, and optimization tools to ensure power is available when and where it’s needed most.
Solar continues to play a dominant role in the energy transition because of a breakthrough levelized cost of energy. Its physics, unit economics, and manufacturing “experience curve” have driven down its LCOE by a factor of more than 1,000 over the past fifty years, and the trend is continuing (see the Economist Essay “Sun Machines”). In 2024, the U.S. added 34 gigawatts of utility-scale solar capacity, accounting for 60% of all new power generation and marking a 74% increase over the previous record set in 2023. Batteries also hit a new record high, with 11 gigawatts added in 2024. Texas and California remain at the forefront of this expansion, driving the deployment of both solar and storage at scale.
Electricity Demand is Surging—But the Grid Isn’t Prepared for It
Electricity demand in the U.S. is also growing rapidly for the first time in decades and becoming more dynamic. According to Grid Strategies, demand could grow by 128 gigawatts over the next five years—a fivefold increase from the 23-gigawatt forecast made just two years ago.
The main drivers of these dramatic estimates reflect the accelerating energy needs of data centers, which are projected to account for 5–10% of U.S. electricity consumption by 2030 (read our full article on Powering Sustainable AI in Data Centers). There is also rising demand from new manufacturing facilities and widescale electrification of vehicles, homes, and industrial processes.
The grid, once built around centralized generation and predictable, stable demand, now requires real-time intelligence and flexibility to integrate new resources, remain reliable and support continued economic growth.
This transition is both an engineering challenge and an economic one. The International Energy Agency estimates that more than half of the world’s electricity will come from low-carbon sources by mid-century, requiring over $2 trillion in annual investment.
Yet, integrating new, distributed energy resources while balancing them with accelerating and new sources of demand is one of the central challenges for the energy transition and economic growth.
The Path Forward? Intelligent Energy Orchestration Systems.
A more resilient energy system requires a multi-pronged approach. Expanding clean firm power, modernizing transmission and distribution infrastructure, and increasing flexibility across asset types and market structures are all critical components of a more resilient energy system. Equally important is the deployment of intelligent and flexible data-driven systems that can optimize energy flows in real time, ensuring reliability across a fragmented and increasingly complex grid.
This is precisely where Equilibrium Energy excels.
Enter Equilibrium Energy: The Next-Generation Power Company
Equilibrium Energy is building a next-generation power company enabling the energy transition. Equilibrium Energy has started by orchestrating grid-scale battery storage assets—the most flexible, reliable, lowest-cost, carbon-free resources on the grid. By combining deep expertise in grid operations with AI-driven forecasting and real-time market intelligence, Equilibrium Energy optimizes energy storage, ensuring that power is available when and where it’s needed most.
Equilibrium Energy has all the elements needed to enable the energy transition at scale—an advanced, AI-native technology platform, proven market success, and a leadership team with the experience to execute. As electricity demand surges and the grid becomes more volatile, the future of power depends not just on adding clean energy, but on intelligently managing it.
Through advanced energy orchestration, Equilibrium Energy integrates real-time market signals, asset performance data, and predictive analytics. Their platform maximizes battery efficiency which enhances grid stability, and drives better economic outcomes for both energy suppliers and consumers. This intelligence layer is essential in transforming intermittent renewable generation into a firm, dispatchable resource, accelerating the transition to a resilient, carbon-free grid.
With its AI approach and real-time visibility, Equilibrium Energy generates highly accurate predictions about grid behavior at any given time and location, enabling optimization of energy flows at scale. Today, the company is putting its platform to work by optimizing grid-scale batteries through a tolling contract, managing how energy is stored, traded, and dispatched in real time.
This model has already proven successful in Texas and California, two of the most dynamic energy markets where renewable penetration and battery deployments are accelerating rapidly. In Texas, where the electricity market is among the most competitive in the world, Equilibrium Energy has consistently outperformed similarly sized battery assets, generating more revenue per megawatt than other market participants.
By delivering superior financial and operational outcomes, Equilibrium Energy is demonstrating the critical role of real time energy management, orchestration, and flexibility in the clean energy transition.
Optimizing battery performance strengthens grid stability and creates a virtuous cycle: greater efficiency drives down costs, accelerates deployment, and enables the energy transition to scale with greater speed, reach, and precision.
Equilibrium Energy’s platform goes far beyond battery optimization. The company’s data model combines power market prices with grid fundamentals across ~10,000 nodes on the U.S. grid to create forecasts for every hour of every day. This data-driven intelligence not only refines trading strategies but also enables broader portfolio management and optimization across multiple asset types and commercial products.
At its core, Equilibrium Energy is building the digital backbone of a next-generation utility—one that understands, trades, and optimizes portfolios of energy assets across generation, storage, and consumption.
Equilibrium Energy In Context
Climate change is not a distant or abstract threat—it is an urgent threat to us all, the way we live, and the infrastructure we rely on every day. It is an economic issue as much as an environmental one, with energy at the center of both.
Volatile, elevated energy prices are felt fiscally by everyone on their monthly utility bills and in the price of goods. Intense, frequent weather events are felt viscerally when there isn’t enough energy to heat or cool homes for multiple consecutive days of extreme temperatures. Energy powers nearly every aspect of modern life—how we live, work, eat, and move. It also accounts for 73% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is in the early innings of a deep transformation.
Solar power is powering the beginning of this transformation because it is winning on economics alone and solving real problems at this moment for AI infrastructure and electrification—namely, time to power, scalability, and cost. The natural next step is to enable energy abundance and resilience through the rapid deployment of a broad portfolio of energy assets. This next era requires intelligent, advanced tools and technologies to navigate the transition.
Why We Invested in Equilibrium Energy
At Valo Ventures, we invest in companies that have deep domain expertise and a strong technology edge to lead a market transition. Equilibrium Energy is doing exactly that—building the intelligence layer that will make the energy transition faster, more efficient, and more scalable. Here’s why we believe Equilibrium Energy stands out:
- A Market at an Inflection Point – The grid is evolving rapidly, with renewable penetration soaring and electricity demand growing at an unprecedented pace. However, the market lacks the sophisticated intelligence needed to optimize energy flows in real time. Equilibrium Energy’s platform fills this gap, bringing much-needed efficiency and flexibility to an increasingly complex system.
- A Technology-First Approach to Grid Optimization – The future of energy isn’t just about adding more capacity; it’s about making the grid smarter. Equilibrium Energy’s AI-driven platform integrates real-time data, market signals, and predictive modeling to optimize energy storage and dispatch, thereby reducing volatility, improving grid efficiency, and driving better economic outcomes for market participants.
- A Strong Competitive Edge in Energy Markets – Equilibrium Energy has already demonstrated best-in-class performance in competitive power markets. In Texas—the most dynamic electricity market in the US—it has consistently outperformed similarly sized battery assets, generating more revenue per megawatt than other market participants. This ability to optimize asset performance and trading strategies provides a scalable advantage as battery deployment and new generation additions accelerate.
- A Foundational Shift in Energy Management – The energy transition isn’t just about replacing fossil fuels with renewables; it’s about building an entirely new approach to energy management. Equilibrium Energy is seamlessly integrating generation, storage, and consumption to deliver both economic and environmental benefits.
- A Team with Deep Industry Expertise – Success in energy markets requires both technical excellence and market sophistication. Equilibrium Energy’s leadership team has a rare combination of expertise at the intersection of power markets, technology and commercial development. Their ability to navigate the complexities of the electricity market positions them as a critical player in shaping the future of energy.
The future of energy will not be defined solely by deploying more CapEx via net new generation or transmission and distribution capacity, but by embedding AI and intelligence into every aspect of the system. Equilibrium Energy is at the forefront of this shift, leveraging AI-driven portfolio optimization to balance supply and demand, enhancing grid flexibility, and supporting large energy consumers in managing costs while decarbonizing their operations.
As Equilibrium Energy tackles some of the most pressing challenges in the energy sector—volatility, security, and affordability—Valo Ventures is proud to partner with them in building the future of energy orchestration that optimizes for cost, flexibility, and reliability.
If you are a startup, investor, or corporate enabling the energy transition, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to our team at hello@valoventures.org.
