January 23rd, 2023 — Heatwaves and cold snaps last year in California and Texas featured the long-anticipated arrival of battery energy storage, which delivered peak capacity and reserves to stave off blackouts. Adding to the momentum, the Inflation Reduction Act included provisions for a storage investment tax credit and domestic storage manufacturing incentives, translating into significant development activity. In June 2022, over 135,000 MW of energy storage capacity was in the CAISO interconnection queue alone, the majority of which will be co-located with solar.
However, storage presents a new level of complexity and possibility for those developing, investing in, and operating standalone storage or hybrid assets. Not only do storage assets require an active strategy for determining when to charge and discharge, they also expand the potential services that a renewable energy facility can provide. Long-term PPAs fueled wind and solar development, whereas storage offtake relies on contracts, such as tolling agreements and hedges, that have more in common with traditional power marketing.
As such, as early in a development process as project siting, developers need to have a keen understanding of the value of power at a given location and a view toward how a project will realize potential value in wholesale markets for a range of services: energy, capacity, ancillary services, and more.
These dynamics are becoming too complex to model accurately and efficiently in spreadsheets or with software tools that address a single aspect of the asset lifecycle. To unlock storage deployment at a massive scale, developers need to understand where and how to build, investors how to confidently value storage assets, and operators how to forecast and capture value on a daily basis.
Tyba provides end-to-end modeling tools for standalone and hybrid storage projects. This includes energy production models for solar, dispatch optimization and price forecasting for storage assets, bidding algorithms for wholesale power markets, and the key data inputs for each. Users can apply these models to inform daily operations workflows, defend assumptions in project financings, optimize plant design and system sizing, and determine valuable locations to site a project.
Over the next decade, our energy grid will have much more energy storage than it has today.
After tripling in 2021, utility-scale energy storage in the US is expected to exceed 30 GW of installed capacity by 2025, and the EIA expects that over 60% of new energy storage capacity will be sited alongside solar.
Globally, BNEF expects over 400 GW of cumulative installation by the end of 2030, a 15x expansion from 2021 levels.
These tailwinds are meaningful for a wide variety of energy market stakeholders, and solar developers, storage developers, IPPs, asset owners, and utilities are all being forced to adapt to this new reality.
But optimally designing and operating these systems is complicated.
With solar and wind operating as mature markets and as utilities and IPPs have increasingly adopted new tools to manage the variable production of renewable energy, the growth of energy storage assets represents a new frontier.
Modeling, financing, and operating these assets adds significant complexity to the workstreams of solar developers and operators in particular, who are actively looking for tools and hiring talent to manage storage.
Tyba offers a storage and solar + storage project modeling solution that informs how teams design, build, finance, and operate assets.
With a flexible software platform that can be used by multiple types of stakeholders and across a wide range of customer sophistication levels, Tyba is uniquely suited to support the rapid growth of energy storage.
With experience from Stem, Cypress Creek Renewables, Google X, and Asana, the founding team brings both deep renewable energy expertise and a strong technical skill set, which they’ve strategically augmented through early hires.
Tyba has built two products, which use the same underlying models but are geared toward different stages of the project lifecycle: (1) software for development and financing and (2) software for daily operations and risk management.
With the development and financing product, Tyba allows users to model and evaluate various system constructs quickly. This includes specifying potential locations down to the node level, selecting detailed system configurations, and choosing from various commercialization and revenue strategies. From there, users can model and simulate thousands of different design variations for a single project or group of projects.
With the operations product, Tyba allows users to apply the same dispatch strategies, AI-driven price predictions, and bidding algorithms in the field. This allows companies to gain greater visibility and control over different operational strategies' risk/reward trade-offs. As with the design simulations, this includes optimizing for both energy day-head, energy real-time, and ancillary service revenues.
Powerhouse Ventures is proud to co-lead Tyba’s $2.25M seed round alongside Wireframe Ventures and with participation from Lorimer Ventures, MKT1 Capital, and Virta Ventures. We look forward to working with CEO and Co-Founder Michael Baker, CTO and Co-Founder Tyler Nisonoff, COO and Co-Founder Tom Thunell, and the entire Tyba team to optimize the grid-scale energy storage that is critical for our energy transition.
Special thanks to Gabe Cuadra & Marie Thompson.
To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.