On a project in Santa Rosa, in Northern California, Alex Shoer says adding batteries is turning out to be roughly three times more valuable than adding solar. He calls the speed of that shift the thing he did not see coming. Shoer, managing partner at GridVest, spent about a decade building solar finance businesses in China before moving to California in 2020, and on the Cleaning Up podcast he tells host Bryony Worthington that storage is now doing what solar did before it: crossing from subsidised curiosity into ordinary economics. Two years ago, he says, the same class of project was hard to make pencil, because batteries cost more and utility rate structures were less favourable. Demand charges, electricity prices and a growing appetite for resilience have moved fast enough to flip it.
GridVest occupies an unglamorous part of the market, and that is the point. The company describes itself on its own website as a distributor and financier of battery storage systems for commercial and industrial scale projects, founded by Shoer alongside David Quint, whose background is in asset-backed lending. Shoer's argument on the podcast is that difficulty runs opposite to size: utility-scale projects are technically the simplest, because a large battery plugs into the grid and cycles on a schedule, while a school, hotel or factory has to weigh selling power back against using it, charging from solar, and feeding EV chargers, with far more variables to model. Timelines run the other way, he says. Front-of-meter utility scale takes seven to nine years, distribution level projects three or four, commercial and industrial one to two, and residential a year or less. The hardest projects to engineer are the ones that arrive first.
His read on why storage is finally moving is a story about the load rather than the panel. He describes demand charges as utility billing driven by brief spikes in draw, so a single accidental peak, a machine left running, can reset a commercial customer's rate structure for the year, and says batteries are unusually good at shaving exactly that. The same logic turns up in data centres, where he says GPU loads spike hard enough that utilities struggle with the swing, and in fast charging, where he offers the example that a single 200 to 250 kW charger can draw about as much power as the hotel it is parked behind. He is sceptical of the fully off-grid, gas-turbine data centre, arguing it is complex to operate and exposed to gas prices. On chemistry, he says LFP is the stationary default, sodium ion is coming but will likely be dominated by the same Chinese manufacturers because the process is similar, and solid state is where the US has a real head start.
The manufacturing conversation is where he is most pointed. Having watched Chinese cell plants up close, Shoer compares them to newspaper printing presses running almost unattended, and his conclusion is that trying to beat them head-on at commodity LFP is a game already lost. His preference is partnership, and he points to the Ford and CATL arrangement as the shape of it, arguing he would trust cells from that pairing over a first-time domestic LFP manufacturer. He notes GM's tie-up with Redwood Materials in the same breath, and observes that two Michigan car companies are quietly turning into energy companies. He also offers a piece of history worth sitting with. Beijing ended its solar generation subsidy overnight on 31 May 2018, he says, after which module prices fell around 30 percent within months, projects stalled for six to nine months, and what emerged on the other side was a subsidy-free market that worked. He draws the parallel to the US investment tax credit himself, calling it a blessing that got a great deal started and has now, in his view, become something closer to a curse.
Bottom line: the most useful thing in this hour is Shoer's insistence that the cells are not the bottleneck. The batteries work. What does not work yet is the system architecture around them, the permitting, and what he calls an overcorrection by local authorities on fire risk based on older chemistries. That is a boring, solvable, procedural problem, which is precisely why it will take longer to fix than anything in a lab. Anyone still waiting for a battery breakthrough before taking storage seriously is watching the wrong variable.
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