It's Friday. Every gigawatt of data center demand is out hunting new supply. Two companies just started selling the capacity already hiding inside other people's buildings.
In today's edition:
🔌 Big Story: Redaptive and Recurve sell verified flexibility as grid capacity
⚡ Quick Hits: Italy's geothermal turbines, New York's thin reserve margin
💰 Capital Stack: Eos funds the customer that orders from Eos
📋 Policy Watch: grid resilience grants frozen, Italy trims storage payments
📊 Chart of the Day: 715 projects reenter PJM's queue
But first…
☕ Event Announcement: Grid Innovation Virtual Coffee Chat
Presented by Grid Innovation Hub
Thursday, August 13 · Virtual · Hosted by Adam Shaw
Join fellow grid professionals for a virtual coffee chat on advanced technology strategies and implementations on the power grid. Conversation spans generation, transmission and distribution, grid modernization, project development, operations and compliance, and venture capital, and it runs on crowd-sourced problems rather than slides. No presentations. No sales.
Grid Innovation Hub subscribers are encouraged to register for the next session.
The Big Story
Redaptive and Recurve turn demand flexibility into data center capacity.
Redaptive and Recurve launched a joint platform aimed at cutting the time it takes a data center to get power. Redaptive, a US energy-as-a-service company, brings financing and deployment. Recurve, a California software company, brings its Flex platform, which measures and verifies how much electricity customers actually save or shift using smart meter data rather than controlling devices. Inside the facility the scope covers cooling optimization, HVAC upgrades, peak-shaving batteries, and energy management. Outside it, Redaptive finances efficiency retrofits, distributed generation, and demand response at commercial and industrial sites. Neither company disclosed contract volumes, pricing, or a launch customer.
“Power is one of the biggest bottlenecks in data center growth right now. Everyone's focused on new power sources, but a lot of the opportunity is already sitting inside the facilities they operate today.”
Flex measures and verifies load reductions from smart meter data, which according to Recurve lets utilities treat demand flexibility as a resource they can carry into planning.
Much of the freed capacity sits at third-party commercial and industrial sites, so the product sells headroom on the surrounding grid as well as efficiency behind the fence.
Neither named a utility partner, pilot site, or megawatt figure, so faster time to power is untested in public.
Source: Data Center Dynamics
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Five from across the stack, from Italian turbine shops to a flywheel farm chasing inertia.
Turboden, the Mitsubishi-owned Italian turbine maker, has delivered six of twelve units rated up to 50 MW each for Fervo's Cape Station in Utah under a 1.75 GW framework, while almost no geothermal turbine production happens on US soil. Latitude Media
NYISO officials argue New York's data center moratorium misses the real reliability problem, a 417 MW summer reserve margin that is the thinnest since 2017 after 4.4 GW retired against 2.9 GW added. IEEE Spectrum
Invinity Energy Systems sold a 43 MWh vanadium flow system to Dairyland Power Cooperative, an unusually large co-op bet on non-lithium chemistry. Energy-Storage.news
CGDG began construction on a 20 MW flywheel array in Qinghai, built to restore inertia the Chinese grid is losing as wind and solar grow. ESS News
NRG Energy is close to a 1.2 GW hyperscaler supply deal that Utility Dive reports at $3.2 billion, with over 95% of cash flow from capacity payments. Utility Dive
The Capital Stack
Eos funds the customer that orders from Eos.
Eos Energy reported a record $807 million backlog, 3.4 GWh of its zinc-based systems, up 25% sequentially. The order behind that number is the unusual part. Frontier Power USA, a joint venture Eos co-funded alongside Cerberus Capital Management and Hudson Bay Capital Management, closed roughly $263 million of equity and then placed a $100 million order with Eos for phase one of its Blanquilla project. A manufacturer short of bankable customers just capitalized one. Revenue tripled to $68.8 million against a $275.7 million net loss.
Source: Eos Energy Enterprises
Also in the capital stack:
Partners Group is taking a majority stake in generator and microgrid supplier AVK and committing $1 billion to scale its on-site power offering for data centers. Data Center Dynamics
BlocPower, the a16z and Microsoft backed electrification startup, is negotiating a restructuring that Latitude Media reports would leave crowdfunded investors behind senior creditors. Latitude Media
Policy Watch
The Trump administration is blocking billions of dollars of federal grid resilience grants, and Canary Media reports the terminations have already killed reliability projects at Alliant Energy and SMUD, pulling the cost share that made them pencil out. Canary Media
Italy's ARERA proposed cutting the maximum annual payment in the 2029 battery storage capacity auction to €22,000 per MWh per year, citing falling battery costs, which tightens the revenue developers can bid against. ESS News
Chart of the Day:
Storage leads PJM's reformed queue on project count, gas on megawatts.
PJM accepted 715 projects totaling 201.5 GW into the first cycle of its first-ready, first-served process. Storage leads on count, 314 projects against gas at 147. Gas leads capacity, 99.8 GW against storage's 60.0 GW. Chart courtesy of PJM Interconnection.
Source: Renewable Energy World · August 5, 2026
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