Go big or go home: Bryte becomes Terraflow Energy Europe

Bryte came through 6AM’s very first cohort. We wish Ask and the whole team the best of luck.

Bryte Batteries has joined forces with Houston-based Terraflow Energy to establish Terraflow Energy Europe, headquartered in Trondheim. Ask Ibsen Lindal, who led Bryte, heads the new company, and all five people from Bryte have moved across with him. The ownership is split 60/40 in the Americans’ favour.

The new company holds the exclusive European licence to market, sell, distribute, install, commission and service Terraflow’s redox flow battery systems and their long duration uninterruptible power supply technology. Terraflow Energy keeps ownership of the underlying technology, the intellectual property and the manufacturing know-how.

The decision behind it

The striking part is not the partnership. It is that Bryte shelved the battery technology it had spent years developing in order to do this.

“Terraflow Energy is scaling up the technology we explored in Bryte,” Ibsen Lindal told Shifter. “Today China dominates the world market, measured both in number of plants and in their size. In Bryte we concluded that this is a go big or go home technology. So when Terraflow, with real capital behind them, picks up the pace here in the West, it is a perfect match for us.”

That is a hard call to make. Founders are rarely rewarded for concluding that someone else is better positioned to win with the approach they believed in. Choosing the outcome over the ownership of it takes a kind of clarity most teams never have to find.

Read from the other side, it looks less like giving something up. Terraflow’s co-founder and CEO Jon Parrella said establishing a presence in Europe had to be about more than selling into the region.

We wanted the right team in place, with technical knowledge, market experience and the ability to build the infrastructure around the technology. Bryte gives us that foundation, and Terraflow Energy Europe gives us a real operational presence we can grow from.

The technology was shelved. The team was the point.

Why data centres

Redox flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolyte held in large tanks, which makes them suited to big stationary installations rather than anything that moves. Terraflow’s integration technology is built specifically for the problems AI data centres are running into: power volatility, and the need for local reserves.

“We are looking at data centres because in the short term we can solve problems for customers who are willing to pay,” Ibsen Lindal said. “From there we can scale the technology, pull out the learning curves, and use it to solve problems in other sectors.”

The first pilot plant is planned for Bellville outside Houston, at 25 MW and 250 MWh, roughly 50 by 90 metres. Pilot batteries and smaller installations will be built in Texas, with larger ones eventually produced at a European factory. Whether that factory lands in Norway is, in Ibsen Lindal’s words, too early to answer.

The full story was reported by Sebastian Holsen in Shifter.