Modern Energy seeks a world with abundant, accessible, sustainable energy for everyone.
Modern Energy is a holding company with businesses focused on energy efficiency, distributed generation, demand response, and energy storage. Modern Energy’s businesses identify emerging energy asset classes and leverage their differentiated knowledge, talent, and capital to bring those asset classes to scale.
New hardware and software innovations are rapidly reshaping the competitive landscape of energy markets. Cost reductions in energy efficiency, generation, management, and storage are changing the economics of energy markets. At the same time, new software applications are dramatically reducing the transaction costs required to purchase, aggregate, dispatch, and monetize millions of small energy installations, ranging from industrial coolers to solar home systems. Together, these changes represent a fundamental transformation of the energy ecosystem and enable Modern Energy to play a catalytic role in bringing new technologies to scale.
our businesses
Modern Energy has a portfolio of businesses working on various elements of the energy transition, including energy efficiency, distributed generation, demand response, and energy storage.
American Efficient
American Efficient partners with electric utilities to develop and operate portfolios of distributed energy resources, especially demand response and energy efficiency.
Faro Energy
Faro is a distributed solar energy company with operations in Brazil, Colombia, and the United Kingdom.
Tether Energy
Tether Energy gathers dynamic clean energy resources and connects them to the electric grid.
our investments
Modern Energy makes strategic investments in grid edge technology companies that contribute to our mission to make clean energy abundant. We work with these companies to test, refine and launch new energy transition solutions.
Upside Energy
Upside has developed a cloud service that aggregates the energy stored in systems people and businesses already own – uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), solar PV systems (solar panels), electric vehicles (EV), etc.
ndustrial.io
ndustrial.io deploys real-time cloud based applications for factories and industrial facilities around the world to ensure a successful path toward digital transformation and resource efficiency.
PlotWatt
PlotWatt’s machine-learning algorithms analyze energy usage data, which it converts into actionable insights that residential and commercial customers follow to improve energy and process-efficiency. Modern Energy’s wholly owned subsidiary American Efficient acquired PlotWatt in 2018.
Business PHILOSOPHY
Our business activities are driven by our beliefs about the market:
Distributed Energy Growth - We believe the proportion of energy produced worldwide by distributed energy will increase dramatically in the next several decades.
Energy Market Disruption - We believe distributed energy technologies will both disrupt traditional energy markets as well as alter the economics of energy markets in large and small-scale ways.
Capital Agility - We believe intelligent investors must tailor their investment solutions to the stage or maturity of the developer with whom they are working. That will trend towards enterprise/corporate investments when the developer is young, and can transition to asset investment as the portfolio and developer mature.
Generalization - We believe the technologies, strategies, systems and learnings discovered in one local market can be applied to numerous other disparate local markets.
Localization - We believe local market conditions, management teams, and business contexts are determinant forces in investment opportunities and separate strong opportunities from weak.
Falling Transaction Costs - We believe new technologies are enabling developers to focus on smaller and more distributed energy assets by reducing transaction costs throughout the development cycle.
Democratization - We believe the adoption of distributed energy is creating material opportunities to democratize energy access.
Transitional Markets - We believe the richest opportunities are found in transitional markets where the most economic solution for market participants has recently changed. First movers, who identify the right bellwether events, can create outsized returns in these markets.
Risk Pricing - We believe risk in transitional markets is often mispriced. A business able to price risks appropriately is poised to profit disproportionately.
Encumbered Incumbents - We believe high regulatory hurdles, large revenue expectations on sunk costs, and a lack of agility will cause incumbents to struggle to pursue some new energy opportunities on their own, leaving space for others to collaborate or compete.