On December 7, 2020, Alphabet-backed Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) announced a $100 million transaction as part of its new advanced power grid platform, Resilia, focused on making electrical systems bidirectional, transactive, and distributed. The transaction includes a $20 million Series C investment in OhmConnect, Inc. and an $80 million commitment to finance North America's largest distributed clean power plant, Resi-Station. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati represented OhmConnect in the transaction.
The 550 MW Resi-Station project will be funded by SIP and developed in partnership with OhmConnect. It will comprise hundreds of thousands of actively engaged customers with a fleet of in-home smart devices delivering target energy reductions, orchestrated by technology that predicts, incentivizes, and coordinates residential energy use. The commitment of SIP's capital will significantly expand OhmConnect's ability to pay California residents who conserve energy by turning off the A/C or unplugging major appliances during peak stress, helping to avert blackouts and lowering consumer costs. At scale, Resi-Station could provide 5 GWh of energy conservation, equal to the full amount of the energy shortfall in this year's blackouts in California, and the equivalent of not burning 3.8 million pounds of coal. Resi-Station would also be the largest residential virtual power plant in the world.
The Series C investment and Resi-Station commitment represent the SIP Resilia platform's first major transaction. The Resilia platform will develop and scale technology and infrastructure innovations as global energy grids shift from centralized power to distributed, sustainable solutions. The funding will help advance OhmConnect's leading interactive energy efficient technology and improve the resilience of power grids by bringing more customers onto its platform, thus increasing its ability to provide demand response resources to the grid, and furthering its mission of achieving a clean energy future.
For more information, please see OhmConnect's press release. Further coverage can be found at CNBC, Greentech Media, and Fast Company.