10 Years of Evolution – and Scaling Up to Serve Our Customers

Ten years ago (!), Scale Microgrids was founded with a mission to “power the world with distributed energy.” This was based on a pair of core insights: 

• The utility grid was facing fundamental challenges in meeting the needs of large energy users; and 
• New, modular power generation and storage technologies, along with sophisticated digital controls, were making it possible to solve these challenges with on-site energy solutions tailored to customer needs.

A decade later, those insights have been thoroughly validated in all the ways we anticipated – and also at a ‘scale’ that we didn’t originally expect. But following through on our customer-centric convictions has led us, step by step, to become a trusted energy provider for some of the most demanding and complex facilities in the country: Fortune 500 retail and logistics facilities, major universities and public water utilities, and hyperscale data centers driving the U.S. economy.

Our ability to serve all of these customers, including the largest tech companies in the world, isn’t just about being in the right place at the right time. It's the result of 10 years of hard-won expertise, strategic evolution, and a relentless focus on solving customer problems – whatever those problems are, and however complex they turned out to be. This is the story of how we got here.

Prologue: On-Site Natural Gas Generation Pioneers

Before Scale existed, our founding team had already spent years on the frontier of on-site energy. Our Chief Engineer Howard Goodman, along with CEO Ryan Goodman, VP of Data Center Solutions Duncan Campbell, Head of C&I Kristel Watson, and other key team members came from ENER-G RUDOX – a pioneer in packaging, engineering, and operating on-site natural gas generation solutions. 

These systems were deployed in a wide range of configurations to meet different customer needs, including cogeneration, backup power, and even fully islanded microgrids for high-profile special events and permanently off-grid facilities. In the process, the team became an early leader in demonstrating that natural gas generator-based projects could provide leading-edge efficiency for customers with mission-critical reliability requirements – including projects for data centers. 

This boundary-pushing expertise was (and still is) rare, and highly valued. In 2016, Goodman sold ENER-G RUDOX to international energy conglomerate Centrica, which rebranded the company as Centrica Business Solutions. 

After this successful exit, the founding team didn’t cash out and kick back. With all of that hard-won expertise and experience, and an eye towards how the energy landscape – and customer needs – were evolving, they got to work building a new company.

Leading the Way on Advanced Microgrids

Shortly after the sale of ENER-G RUDOX, Scale was founded to pursue on-site solutions that combined gas generation with a broader set of emerging technologies to address a wider range of customer challenges. By adding solar and battery storage, along with expertly configured microgrid controls, we could offer customers ultra-reliable advanced microgrids that also saved them money on their utility bills and improved their sustainability performance – a game-changing value proposition, especially compared to backup generators that are purely a cost center, sitting idle 99% of the time. 

We weren’t, and aren’t, the only company building advanced microgrids – so called because they orchestrate multiple on-site energy assets, as opposed to the generator-only “basic” microgrids we used to build – but we were one of the only startups to have the audacity to build a company focused purely on these applications. Our main competitors were, and are, small divisions of much larger equipment manufacturers or EPC companies that have always treated microgrids as an incremental addition to their core business. 

By contrast, Scale pursued a vertically integrated business model: designing, financing, building, owning, and operating turnkey on-site energy systems, and doing all of it from a single balance sheet instead of the more common split between technology providers and investors. This difference meant we could – and had to – move more quickly, innovate more boldly, and focus more intensely on solving our customers’ site-specific energy challenges and surpassing their expectations. 

To maximize the benefits of these systems, we developed our own project optimization and operations software, built to ‘scale’ across the multi-site portfolios of larger businesses. To deliver them more efficiently, we partnered with a wide range of equipment manufacturers to ensure robust supply chains, and we became adept at managing evolving utility interconnection processes. And to make these benefits more accessible and financially appealing, we pioneered microgrid service agreements (MSAs) that, similar to traditional energy service agreements (ESAs), enabled customers to save from day one with no up-front cost. 

These, and countless other small innovations and big steps along the way, have enabled us to solve customer problems that have steadily evolved, and become more complex, since 2016. First came urgent power reliability issues driven by increasingly frequent extreme weather events – particularly in California in the wake of the devastating wildfires of 2019. Then came skyrocketing electricity rates after the pandemic, with utility rates outpacing inflation with increases of 50% or more in key markets over the past 5 years. 

And in recent years, we started hearing from customers who simply couldn't get enough power (or any power at all) from their utility in a reasonable amount of time. 

These intertwined, intensifying challenges all add up to the national electricity polycrisis we’re facing today. And by addressing its manifestations across a diverse set of customers, each with their own site constraints, unique operational requirements, and tough problems to solve, Scale built the engineering depth and project execution capabilities needed to deliver results for them. 

The results validated our audacious ambitions, and attracted serious institutional capital. Thanks to our strong business fundamentals and the potential of the platform we had built, Scale was backed by Warburg Pincus in 2020 and went on to raise over $1 billion in project financing from a wide range of institutional lenders. In 2025, we transitioned to an equity partnership with EQT – the second-largest private equity firm in the world, with $320B AUM, including over $20B invested in energy and digital infrastructure. 

Today, Scale's advanced microgrid business is still expanding, solving energy challenges for a growing number of Fortune 500 customers with large facilities across the country. And we’ve become the largest pure-play advanced microgrid developer in the industry – by far. 

From Scale to Hyperscale 

All of that experience and expertise have prepared us to tackle today’s biggest energy challenge: meeting the needs of power-hungry AI data centers with hundreds of megawatts of demand that can ramp up and down in milliseconds. These colossal facilities can generate billions of dollars in annual revenue… if they can get power. And more and more of these projects are facing 5-10 year queues for a firm utility interconnection. 

For Scale, it’s a familiar story of grid capacity delays, a problem we’ve been solving for other customers for years – just at a much larger ‘scale’ of customer and economic stakes.

Solving the complex energy challenges that data centers face requires what we call "energy centers" – essentially very large, integrated on-site power systems that typically rely on natural gas generation for prime power, often in tandem with battery storage to smooth out the volatility of AI loads, and renewables integrated behind-the-meter or via the grid when available. In many cases, these energy centers can power sites far faster than waiting on the utility grid, either by running fully islanded for sites with no grid connection at all, or by supplying the dispatchable power needed to avoid curtailment at sites with limited grid access. 

And, while we didn’t quite imagine projects of this size when we founded Scale a decade ago, building these multi-hundred megawatt energy centers turns out to require the exact set of capabilities we've spent the past decade developing: operating high-uptime natural gas generation assets, power engineering and controls for on-site power systems, orchestration and optimization of thermal generation with battery storage, navigating utility interconnection complexities, and above all, delivering projects efficiently to meet speed-to-power needs.

That said, to “hyperscale” up these capabilities, we had to expand our team. 

The first step was the acquisition of the fast-growing powered land developer Reload, who brought an incredible team featuring executives with experience at industry-leading companies like NextEra and Trina Solar – and a track record of developing gigawatts of battery storage and clean power generation for hyperscaler customers. Their expertise in utility-scale project development is exactly what we needed to go from building commercial and industrial facility-sized installations to siting energy centers on massive data center campuses, with experience securing access to gas and fiber infrastructure, obtaining air and water permits, and engaging with local communities. 

This was followed by the addition of a power engineering and operations team from a leading data center developer. They’ve brought to Scale a unique track record of successfully meeting the challenging load requirements and mission-critical reliability needs of data centers with large-scale on-site generation systems, including fully off-grid energy centers. And we’ve simultaneously built out a world-class operations team with experience in mission-critical roles in the natural gas and nuclear power industries.

That operational experience is going to be critical in the months ahead because, unlike some newcomers to this space, we're not just putting out press releases – we're actually doing this, with our first multi-hundred MW, off-grid energy center beginning operations before the end of 2026. We’ve also lined up gigawatts of ready-to-deploy generation inventory for projects with customers on several other potential sites, including projects that will provide flexible, dispatchable capacity for data centers with limited grid interconnections.

Two Sides of One Customer-Centric Coin

On the C&I side, the work that defined Scale’s first decade continues to grow – because the energy challenges facing large commercial and industrial facilities haven't gotten any simpler. If anything, utility rate volatility, grid capacity constraints, and reliability and resilience concerns are intensifying across every sector we serve.

What ties both sides of the business together is the same North Star: serving our customers. We have the resources and the track record to show that we're a long-term partner they can count on for projects of any size – whether that's a university campus microgrid, a municipal water system, or a gigawatt-scale data center energy center. The customer focus embedded in our DNA is what sets us apart from traditional independent power producers without our customer-first track record, and from startups or other unproven entities with nothing to show beyond press releases.

Ten years, two business divisions, and one solutions-focused, customer-first philosophy that has led us to solve a lot of hard problems along the way. Here's to solving many more in the decade ahead!

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