Orenda, Inc

Everyone wants clean power. Almost nobody wants to talk about storing it.

Here is a fact about electricity that is both obvious and, apparently, easy to forget: it has to be used the moment it is made. Solar panels peak at noon. Air conditioners and dinner peak around 6 p.m. The gap between those two facts is, roughly speaking, the entire business of Orenda, Inc - a five-year-old company headquartered at Pearl Street in Brooklyn that builds and operates standalone battery energy storage across Downstate New York.

This is not a company that generates power. It does not own wind turbines or solar farms. What it owns are batteries - big ones, sited on ordinary urban lots - and the software that decides, minute by minute, when to fill them and when to empty them. The pitch is almost aggressively unsexy. There is no consumer app, no logo on a jersey. There is a battery in a fenced yard in Brooklyn, and it is quietly making the grid harder to break.

Which is why the numbers are a little startling. Orenda says it holds around a 34% share of New York City's energy storage market, with a development pipeline of about 920 MW and 2.7 GWh. For a company founded in 2020, in one of the most permit-heavy, land-scarce, regulation-dense cities in America, a one-third market share is the kind of figure that usually indicates either a typo or a great deal of unglamorous work done while competitors were still making slide decks. In Orenda's case it appears to be the second thing.

What a 920 MW pipeline looks like

A rough visual of where Orenda's capacity story sits today. Figures are company-reported and approximate - storage capacity is measured in megawatts (power) and megawatt-hours (energy), and pipelines move.

From trading desks to battery yards

Orenda was founded in 2020 by Bill Grinstead and Aidan Snyder. Grinstead, the president and CEO, did not come from the utility world - he came from finance, with stints at Marlin Equity Partners, a roughly $7B tech-focused private equity firm, and Susquehanna International Group, a global trading firm. That background matters, because a battery is, financially, a machine for trading electricity across time: buy cheap electrons, store them, sell them when they are expensive. It helps to have people who think in spreads.

The broader team - a lean group of around 35 - is drawn from renewable development, project finance, and technology, and is collectively credited with contributing to or advising on hundreds of megawatts of renewable projects. The leadership bench spans product, project execution, construction, pre-construction, external affairs, and asset management. It is, in other words, an infrastructure company with a software department bolted on, rather than the reverse.

How it got here

• 2020
  Founded in Brooklyn by Bill Grinstead and Aidan Snyder, focused on standalone battery storage in Downstate New York.
• 2022 · NOV
  Raised early angel/seed funding (reported ~$2.47M total early), with backers including Ultra Capital, North Sky Capital, and The Clean Fight.
• 2024 · OCT
  North Sky Capital's Sustainable Infrastructure Fund IV made an initial $10M commitment to a development joint venture; commitments reported up to $42.5M.
• 2025 · DEC
  NYPA's updated renewables plan includes ~675 MW of distributed storage to be developed with Orenda.

Facts worth keeping

The unglamorous hero of the energy transition

There is a version of the clean-energy story that is all rooftops and ribbon cuttings. Orenda is working on the other version - the plumbing. Batteries do not generate headlines the way a new solar array does. But a grid full of renewables without storage is a grid that fails at exactly the wrong moments, and someone has to build the shock absorbers. Orenda decided that being that someone, at scale, in the hardest city to do it, was the whole opportunity.

Whether the 34% share holds, whether the 920 MW pipeline converts, whether the NYPA megawatts get built on schedule - those are open questions, as they are for any infrastructure company operating on multi-year timelines. What is clear is the shape of the bet: that in the energy transition, the boring, load-bearing job of storing electricity is worth doing well. Orenda is doing it in Brooklyn, one fenced yard at a time.