\u201cA power plant should be able to be built at any scale in 12 months from contract signing to power on,\u201d Sara Spangelo, co-founder and president of Ambrosia Energy, exclusively told TechCrunch. \u201cOur ambition is to go to gigawatt scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
To bring costs down, the startup has been able to simplify the battery pack. Most grid-scale batteries cycle in two or four hours, a speed which puts more strain on the system. But Ambrosia trickle charges its batteries throughout the day and slowly discharges them at night.<\/p>\n
Those changes, plus some other engineering refinements, has brought the cost for the entire package down to 1.5-times what the company pays for battery cells, less than the industry standard<\/a>.<\/p>\n If Ambrosia can deliver at scale, the startup could upend the energy world. Today, a new combined cycle gas turbine \u2014 the most efficient type \u2014 costs around $107 per megawatt-hour to build and operate, according to Lazard. That\u2019s if you can get one \u2014 gas turbines currently have a five to seven year backlog.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re also way more reliable than gas,\u201d Spangelo said.<\/p>\n Spangelo and her co-founder, CEO Ben Longmier, previously worked on Starlink at SpaceX, which had acquired their startup, Swarm. Swarm had built a low-power, low-bandwidth network for internet of things (loT) devices using dozens of tiny satellites<\/a>. Before that, Spangelo had worked at Google, and Longmier had worked at Apple and a handful of space-related startups. <\/p>\n The pair initially funded Ambrosia with their own money, but the startup recently took an investment from DFJ Growth. Spangelo declined to disclose the size of the investment.<\/p>\n Spangelo drew several parallels between Ambrosia and the work at SpaceX. \u201cA lot of these challenges are very similar across regulatory, technical, go-to-market. If we can bring some of that experience to this, hopefully we can have an impact,\u201d she said. Plus, she said building the power plant modules has been \u201ckind of like deploying a satellite constellation,\u201d Spangelo said. \u201cYou launch four, you learn, you iterate.\u201d<\/p>\n To test its thesis, Ambrosia began building a power plant in West Texas in January, one month after the company was incorporated. \u201cAfter this week, we\u2019ll be almost halfway complete with that power plant,\u201d Longmier said. Six weeks ago, the startup turned on some of the completed sections, and they\u2019ve been operating at 100% capacity since then, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cOur system is basically infinitely scalable,\u201d Spangelo said, allowing customers to kick the tires before committing the large system.\u00a0The power plants can be connected to the grid or installed behind the meter.<\/p>\n The systems could get quite large. \u201cWe have a couple of partners where there\u2019s access to like a million acres,\u201d Longmier said. At that scale, Ambrosia could build a power plant on the order of 30 gigawatts, based on a recent study<\/a> of solar land requirements.<\/p>\n But first, the company is starting smaller, on the order of 20 to 30 megawatts. For now, many of the parts are off-the-shelf, but Ambrosia has plans to gradually replace those with its own custom designs. It\u2019s also planning to build a factory in Austin, Texas, which will allow it to take on larger projects in a shorter time period. The goal is to deliver \u201cgigawatts by the end of the decade,\u201d Spangelo said. \u201cWe\u2019re pretty ambitious.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Ambrosia-Energy-job-site.jpeg\")
Ambrosia Energy started building its own power plant in West Texas earlier this year.Image Credits:Ambrosia Energy<\/p>\n