Boulder Clean Energy Founder Jonas Reyes Lands Utility Partnership

Jonas Reyes, founder of Boulder-based clean energy startup Gridwell Storage, has secured a partnership with a major Colorado utility to deploy the company's battery storage technology at several grid locations across the state, a significant milestone for a company Reyes started five years ago after leaving a career in traditional utility engineering.

"I spent years inside utility companies watching good storage technology get stuck in slow pilot programs that never scaled," Reyes said. "I started Gridwell because I wanted to build something utilities could actually deploy at meaningful scale, not just test forever."

Bridging the Gap Between Startup and Utility Timelines

Reyes says one of the company's biggest early challenges was adapting to the utility industry's characteristically slow, risk-averse procurement and testing processes, which move at a dramatically different pace than the startup world he was trying to build a company within. Gridwell spent nearly two years in smaller pilot deployments with the utility before securing the current larger partnership, a timeline Reyes says tested his investors' patience but was ultimately necessary to build the utility's confidence in the technology.

The company's battery storage systems are designed to help utilities manage peak demand periods more efficiently, reducing the need for expensive backup power generation during high-usage periods. Reyes says the technology's value proposition became significantly easier to communicate to utility partners as more renewable energy has come onto the state's grid, since storage becomes increasingly important for managing the variability of solar and wind generation.

Scaling From Pilot to Statewide Deployment

The new partnership will see Gridwell's technology deployed at multiple grid locations over the coming two years, a significant scale-up from the company's earlier single-site pilot projects. Reyes says the company has had to rapidly build out its manufacturing and installation capacity to meet the deployment timeline, including hiring a dedicated field operations team for the first time.

Reyes says the utility partnership has also attracted interest from utilities in neighboring states, though he's focused on successfully executing the current Colorado deployment before pursuing expansion into new state markets.