The Redwood Energy Ecosystem

When we started Redwood in 2017, the mission was simple to describe and hard to execute: build the supply chain and infrastructure America didn't have for an electrified future it was about to encounter. Every cell going into an American EV was made from materials mined overseas, and every spent battery coming out was treated as waste instead of the above-ground mine that it actually is.

That's still the mission today. And more. We're building for a resilient energy future. We've expanded our strengths into energy systems and built an ecosystem for the partners building that future alongside us.

American companies are changing how they get electricity. Connecting to the grid can take years, and the equipment needed to expand it is in short supply. So, companies need a partner who can supply power quickly, along with the materials and equipment that go into it. Our partnership with Rivian is built to deliver power faster than waiting on the grid.

Through our partnership, Redwood recovers EV batteries from Rivian and deploys energy storage systems directly at Rivian manufacturing facilities. An energy ecosystem.

The case for owning the whole chain

Most companies building solutions for today's energy transition compete on a single piece of this puzzle: better cells, better software, better financing, better panels. Redwood is taking a different path. We are leveraging our access to batteries and taking our own power electronics and control software to build one holistic solution. And because of the technology we've built, we can work with any battery chemistry and almost any power source and we control our own supply chain to deliver power faster and at a lower cost to our customers.

With Rivian, we're deploying energy storage systems directly at Rivian's manufacturing facilities, building on the 10 MWh second-life system already at their Normal, Illinois plant - the first storage system of its kind at a U.S. automaker's factory. At the same time, Rivian's service centers across the country are a natural collection point for batteries coming out of service. Our job is to recover that material efficiently, route it to the right stage of its life, and turn what would otherwise be logistics overhead into a supply chain asset. Now Rivian is benefiting from Redwood's energy ecosystem.

More than the sum of its parts

It would be easy to read our partnership with Rivian as two separate wins: a recycling contract and a storage deployment. But they are two workstreams that build off of each other. Every pack that comes to Redwood to be recycled teaches us something about how batteries degrade in the field, across chemistries, vintages, and use cases. That knowledge is exactly what makes it possible for our power electronics - the DC-DC converters we design and build in-house - to take a heterogeneous stream of returning packs and turn it into a single, dependable power system. We're not buying new cells and competing for the same constrained supply as everyone else. We already own the input.

We're just getting started

The gap between when power is needed and when the grid can provide it has become one of the defining constraints of the moment. Manufacturers are trying to electrify their own operations at a moment when new grid connections can take years and conventional power infrastructure - inverters, transformers, switchgear - is stuck in the same supply chain bottlenecks as everything else in this buildout.

That's true whether the customer is an automaker looking to power a manufacturing plant or a compute provider looking to bring a data center online. The underlying problem is speed to power, at a cost that makes sense, without waiting in line for parts everyone else is also waiting for.

At Redwood we see a path for addressing this need with large-scale power generation and delivery projects that pair our battery systems with solar and other generation sources, designed and engineered end-to-end by our own teams. Our ecosystem of materials, batteries, and power is the foundation for the massive, intelligent microgrids we're building next, designed to meet the scale of demand coming from AI data centers, hyperscalers, and heavy industry alike.

By JB Straubel, Co-founder & CEO