Energy retailer and technology company Amber has announced a close of its Series C funding round at $29 million. The company – which uses technology to manage home batteries, solar and even Vehicle to Grid-enabled EVs for customers – will be expanding throughout Australia and internationally.
“We actually set out to raise $20 million and ended up very oversubscribed, which was great,” CEO of Amber Dan Adams told TheDriven.
“We’ve doubled our customer numbers in the last six months and we’re pretty excited about the opportunity in Australia as battery and EV sales continue to accelerate.”
The lead investor is Gentrack – a billing system that works with Shell Energy, Energy Australia and a number of other energy companies. They’ve provided a $12 million investment. Another large investor is Netherlands based impact fund Rubio Impact Ventures, in a bid for Amber to expand internationally.
“Rubio shares Amber’s vision to drive the grid’s transition to 100% renewable power by allowing everyday households to participate in the benefits of flexibility and storage,” said Helmer Schukken, Rubio Founding Partner.
“Amber’s Smartshift platform for home battery and smart asset automation is a world-leading technology, and Rubio is thrilled to be supporting their efforts to launch new markets in Europe.”
EVs are likely to be one of the largest sources of battery storage into the future, but actually implementing them into the grid (V2G) has been almost impossible so far in Australia.
“We have a very early beta – two customers with vehicle to grid on Amber in South Australia at the moment, making money out of their EVs,” said Adams.
“The challenge is that the regulations around batteries didn’t envisage a battery that would drive away. So, the regulations are catching up.”
Currently, South Australia is the only state who has a power network that approves V2G technology. Adams says he expects that the other states will follow in the next few years.
Although many people charge their EVs using rooftop solar during the day, others still charge overnight. Because there’s less solar power entering the grid, and more demand, this can be a more expensive, and more fossil fuel intensive way to charge.
The Amber system provides more incentives and ability for customers to charge and use other large appliances when the cost is lowest and there’s the most amount of renewables in the grid.
Although currently the technology Amber is offering is not automated – instead providing information on an app, the team is developing a significantly more automated system. This would allow customers to set times for EVs to be fully charged, and a limit of discharge (40% for example) to ensure the car was always ready for use.
“The product that we’re developing will allow customers to set those constraints so that we’re operating in the customer’s interest,” said Adams.
“But within those constraints, the algorithm will maximize the value for the customer.”
“Our goal is to have one-way smart charging of EVs in the market by the middle of this year, and vehicle to grid in about 12 months’ time.”
As more EVs enter the market with V2G capabilities, this will allow more people to not only use their own energy more efficiently, but help transition the grid away from fossil fuels.
“There will be more EVs in Australia than home batteries, but also EV batteries are five times bigger than a home battery. So they have the opportunity to play a very very big role in the energy transition,” says Adams.
“There is actually more battery capacity in our EVs than is required for the energy transition between now and 2030 and our goal is to make much of that available to the grid as possible.”