Energy startup Arbor Energy said Wednesday it has sold up to 5 gigawatts worth of modular turbines to GridMarket, a company that helps arrange power projects for data centers and industrial users.
“Everyone wants more power, and they wanted it yesterday,” Arbor co-founder and CEO Brad Hartwig told TechCrunch. “The time frames are compressing and the scale is getting bigger and bigger.”
Arbor’s Halcyon turbines are based on high-performance engine technology, rocket turbomachines originally developed for spaceflight, and the company’s first commercial turbines are 3D printed and can each generate 25 megawatts. A GridMarket order, if fully fulfilled, is worth 200 units.
Neither company disclosed the exact price of the deal, but Hartwig said Arbor was “willing to pay more than $100 per megawatt hour.” A person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the total value is in the single-digit billions.
The company plans to connect its first turbine to the grid in 2028 and ramp up production through 2030, at which point it hopes to deliver more than 100 turbines a year. The goal is to eventually produce enough for 10 gigawatts of new capacity each year, Hartwig said.
Arbor’s original design intended for Halcyon to survive on a vegetarian diet. Power plants take in organic materials such as crop waste and wood scraps from farms and sawmills, which are converted into synthesis gas (a flammable gas mixture) and burned in the presence of pure oxygen. The result is pure CO2, which can be captured and stored underground.
Under that process, each Halcyon turbine produces carbon negative power. Otherwise, the consumed organic material would have rotted and released methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
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Since then, Arbor has modified Halcyon to accept natural gas in addition to biomass, effectively making it more omnivorous. Otherwise the process remains the same, meaning the CO2 produced can still be sequestered.
Since it uses natural gas, its composition does not make it carbon negative. In fact, as methane leaks from pipes and valves throughout the supply chain, Halcyon turbines running on fossil fuels still emit some greenhouse gases, while also driving continued demand for natural gas. Hartwig said the company works with low-leakage natural gas providers and that “it is economically beneficial to sequester carbon dioxide.”
“In the long term, we expect CO2 emissions to be less than 10 grams per kilowatt hour,” Hartwig said. This is significantly lower than a typical natural gas power plant without carbon capture, which emits about 400 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour.
Arbor has not abandoned biomass power projects and its sales to GridMarket are not limited to one specific fuel. However, other announced deals built around biomass are significantly smaller than the one signed with GridMarket.
Like many energy startups, Arbor has seen significant growth driven by the data center boom. Traditional gas turbine manufacturers were in a bad spot, and given the past volatility of these markets, they were reluctant to significantly increase production. Hartwig said it would be difficult to ramp up production right away, even if they wanted to.
“These supply chains are mostly bottlenecked by the blades and vanes of conventional turbines. The supply chains are quite inelastic, both in terms of the craftsmanship of the production method of producing directionally solidified monocrystalline turbine blades and the highly specialized workforce behind it,” he said. “If you get in line for a turbine now, you’ll probably wait until 2032.”
Arbor is betting that machined and 3D printed parts can help get things to market faster. “People want power in the next few years, and they want a lot of it,” Hartwig said.
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