Behind-the-meter battery startup Stem has raised $80 million in a Series D round, with three new investors — including one that’s helping bring the company’s lithium-ion battery systems to a new international market.
The oversubscribed round was led by growth equity firm Activate Capital. It was joined by Singapore-based investment firm Temasek and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which manages about CAD $180 billion Canadian (USD $145 billion) in Canada’s largest single-profession pension fund.
The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is interested in projects serving the province’s unique renewable energy integration needs, Stem CEO John Carrington noted in an interview. While he wouldn’t provide specific details, he did say that Stem is deploying systems in Canada, making it the company’s third international market, after the United States and, more recently, Japan.
“We are growing very, very fast, and I would say, exceeding [expectations] in a variety of areas,” Carrington said of the company’s recent metrics. In the past six months or so, Stem has grown its portfolio of energy storage systems from 150 megawatt-hours in August to more than 200 megawatt-hours as of this week, with 1,500 sites “operational or in construction.”
The company now has hundreds of systems under management across five states, mainly in California, where state incentives and high demand charges have aligned to create the country’s largest market for behind-the-meter energy storage. Stem also has its 85-megawatt capacity contract with utility Southern California Edison, part of the utility’s groundbreaking distributed energy resource (DER) procurement in 2014, to provide it a steady pipeline of business.
Stem is also active in Hawaii and New York. It has a 1-megawatt pilot project with utility Hawaiian Electric on the island of Oahu. And it’s working with utility Con Edison to deploy 14 megawatt-hours of batteries across 80 locations in New York. More recently, Stem expanded into Massachusetts, with a $1.25 million grant to pilot distributed energy storage under the state’s newly created energy storage target, alongside Constellation Energy.
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