Moment Energy is having a bit of a moment.
On May 19, the burgeoning glocal leader in repurposed electric vehicle (EV) batteries announced what it called a landmark achievement that removes the final technical barrier to mass-market adoption of second-life battery storage, becoming the first-ever company to achieve UL 60730-1 functional safety certification for a battery management system designed specifically for repurposed EV batteries.
Less than a week earlier, Moment Energy began building the world’s largest battery-repurposing facility in Vancouver, British Columbia. The new facility, expected to be complete and fully operational by the end of June, will be a fully vertically integrated system, managing the entire lifecycle from battery intake and testing through to integration and deployment. Its capacity could reach 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) by 2030.
Both milestones came on the heels of Moment Energy’s $40 million Series B funding round, which brought its total capital raised to over $100 million.
Not bad for a company founded by four best friends in a Canadian garage.
As power demand accelerates across North America, energy storage adoption has become increasingly critical. Moment Energy is addressing the challenge by upcycling EV batteries already on the road, transforming them into cost-effective, rapidly deployable energy storage systems. The idea is catching on, to say the least.
Factor This had the opportunity to connect with Edward Chiang, one of the co-founders of Moment Energy, and (not to brag) a member of the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30, to learn more about his company’s technology, its growth, and the larger use case for EV batteries as grid assets. The following Q&A is lightly edited for grammar, conciseness, and clarity.
Paul: Let’s start with your technology. Moment Energy has a unique take on battery energy storage. How does your system work, and what’s the opportunity in the market for re-purposing used EV batteries?
Edward: Our system works by activating a massive dormant domestic resource: the millions of EV batteries already on North American roads. When an EV battery is retired from a vehicle, it still has an average state of health (SoH) of over 80%. Instead of sending those batteries straight to a recycler, we repurpose them into commercial battery energy storage systems (BESS).
Legacy battery manufacturers are struggling with long lead times, massive capex, and geopolitical supply chain risks right at the exact moment that AI, data centers, and industrial electrification are heavily testing the world’s electricity grid. We provide a solution to that bottleneck.
By repurposing these batteries, we give them a second productive life for many more decades, giving data centers, utilities, and property owners a flexible, fast-to-deploy energy storage solution that bypasses those massive supply chain wait times and prevents the cost of energy from rising for the consumer.
Crucially, we are the only provider that has achieved strict safety milestones, meaning we can deploy our second-life systems in built environments safely, without special regulatory dispensations.
Paul: You co-founded this company with your three best friends, right? Take me into the room (or garage, as the case may be) where this idea was born. How did it come about, and how has the collaborative process among that group evolved?
Edward: Yes, I co-founded Moment Energy in early 2020 with three best friends: Sumreen Rattan, Gabriel Soares, and Gurmesh Sidhu.
We are all mechatronics engineers who enjoyed various stints in nuclear, EVs at Tesla, special projects at Apple, and advanced manufacturing in hardware. We co-founded a Formula Electric race team, building and designing race cars from the ground up.
Being in that room, knee-deep in battery tech and electric powertrains, we realized two things: first, that clean energy is a fundamental right that needs to be universally accessible, and second, that a looming wave of retired EV batteries was about to hit the market with nowhere to go.
We transitioned from building race cars to figuring out how to provide affordable, reliable power. The collaborative process has definitely evolved as we’ve scaled from those early days into building the Megafactory 1 in British Columbia and our Gigafactory in Texas.
We’ve grown to over 80 employees and will have over 100 in Vancouver and 200 in Texas. But our core dynamic remains the same. A customer-first philosophy and a deep, data-driven obsession with safety.
Paul: What sort of challenges are you facing as you try to grow the company? How have you had to adapt or pivot to a somewhat tumultuous legislative and financial climate in the US?
Edward: Our biggest challenge historically has been proving that second-life batteries can scale safely beyond just promising pilot programs into mainstream commercial infrastructure. We’ve had to prove to customers that safety and scalability aren’t mutually exclusive.
As for the legislative and financial climate, we’ve actually found a massive opportunity by leaning into it. We recently announced a $40 million Series B funding round, bringing our total raised to over $100 million. By sourcing our batteries domestically and manufacturing in Texas and British Columbia, we insulate ourselves from global supply chain shocks.
Paul: Can you take us through your active pilot projects, deployments, and anything interesting you have planned?
Edward: I personally love our deployment at God’s Pocket Ecolodge; it holds tremendous significance for me. This is because I went there in person to propose to my now-wife.
What I love about this deployment is seeing the massive impact the batteries have had. First of all, the batteries significantly reduce noise pollution, with whales and other marine wildlife now coming closer to the resort since it no longer generates excessive noise from the diesel generator. It also reduced the amount of diesel the resort consumed by taking over for many days after only a few hours of battery charging. Additionally, they now have solar panels, which are directly enabled by the batteries installed there. This deployment has been online for many years and continues to provide immense value.
For over five years now, our systems have been serving commercial customers, supporting applications such as EV fleet charging, critical power for hospitals and airports, and projects to provide power to locations where natural disasters have decimated the local grid, including getting water to the local population.
Paul: Battery recycling and repurposing are hot topics right now. Can you explain how Moment approaches extending battery life, the “swapability” your systems provide, and what the end of their useful life might look like?
Edward: It’s important to distinguish between recycling and repurposing—we do the latter before the former is necessary.
Our systems feature modular swappability, meaning that if one module degrades faster than the others, we can swap it out without replacing the whole system. This extends the lifespan of our BESS to 30 years—double the typical 15-year lifecycle of conventional, new-battery systems. End of life for us means that once these batteries have successfully completed their 10 to 15-year second life in our systems, they are finally sent to actual recyclers. This ensures that critical minerals are fully maximized and kept within the North American circular economy.
Today, recycling unit economics are not where they need to be. The cost of transport really hurts them. This will improve as the technology matures. I hope that by the time our systems reach the end of their lives, recycling technology will be ready.
Paul: Where do you envision Moment Energy in two years? In five? What role does the company play in larger grid resilience and reliability?
Edward: In the next two to five years, I envision Moment Energy successfully scaling our Texas Gigafactory and BC facilities to meet the 5.6 GWh of demand we are seeing, fueled heavily by the rapid growth of AI data centers, quantum computing, and electrification.
I see us pushing the boundaries of what we call “Physical AI”, turning complex, real-world battery data into high-performance energy infrastructure.
Ultimately, our role is to be the architect of the next generation of power infrastructure. We are here to relieve the bottleneck on the grid. Being FEOC compliant is a massive competitive advantage. Many developers are realizing that relying on overseas supply chains exposes them to geopolitical volatility, massive tariffs, and delays.
By deploying compact, highly dense systems (up to 164 MWh of storage per acre), we are enabling rapid electrification, EV fast-charging, and continuous data center operation without forcing developers to wait years for utility transformer or transmission line upgrades.
