Friday 26 August 2022

Former Tesla exec’s start-up Lunar Energy acquires UK’s Moixa

Lunar Energy, a start-up launched by Tesla's former head of energy, has acquired UK smart battery storage specialist Moixa.

The California-based company completed a $300 million (£254m) funding round - backed by South Korea's SK Group and Sunrun, the largest solar installation firm in the US – over the past two years as it quietly worked in stealth.

Lunar aims to launch its first product - a home battery system that can control energy loads – later this year.

In acquiring Moixa, Lunar plans to combine “revolutionary” new hardware with Moixa's GridShare software that manages the thousands of batteries across Europe and Japan.

The software, now called Lunar GridShare, is deployed across 35,000 homes – 330MWh of batteries – via ITOCHU in Japan, supporting advanced smart charging services for Honda electric vehicles (EVs) and facilitating UPS' transition to EV fleets in the UK.

It will now be incorporated into Lunar's innovative technology, aiming to “electrify all homes and connect communities to form clean, resilient virtual power plants”.

Kunal Girotra, Founder and CEO of Lunar Energy said: “More than ever, we need rapid adoption of renewable energy solutions across all sectors to mitigate climate change. Lunar Energy was founded to build affordable hardware and software products for the residential sector to help homeowners generate, store and consume 100% clean energy and remove the usage of fossil fuels from every home.

“The first offering of our product ecosystem is a next-generation home battery system. It's the first step towards our mission to electrify all homes and connect communities to form clean, resilient virtual power plants—freeing us from power outages, rising energy costs and harmful emissions.”