#68 Tether
Turning parked EVs into virtual power plants
Read time: 5 minutes
Hi, I’m Javi Gascón.
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Today we’ll distill a company that’s using AI-powered smart charging to transform parked EVs into a massive, intelligent battery to stabilize the grid: Tether 🇪🇸
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What Problem Does Tether Tackle❓
Tether addresses several interconnected challenges in the evolving energy landscape that threaten grid stability and efficient resource utilization:
1. Grid Instability from Renewable Energy Variability: The rapid transition to renewable energy creates massive challenges for grid operators. Fossil fuel plants provide consistent power but wind and solar generation depends entirely on weather conditions. This creates a fundamental mismatch between when clean energy is produced and when it's needed most.
2. Massive Underutilization of EV Batteries: EVs are often viewed as part of the energy problem but they are an enormous untapped solution. The average vehicle is parked for 95% of its lifetime, yet each EV contains a substantial battery pack (50-100+ kWh of storage capacity). Millions of battery units are parked and unused while grid operators struggle to balance supply and demand.
3. Surging Electricity Demand: The simultaneous electrification of transportation and industrial sectors is dramatically increasing peak electricity demand. As more EVs hit the road and industrial processes shift away from fossil fuels, the strain on an already stressed electrical grid intensifies.
4. Insufficient Energy Storage: Traditional grid infrastructure lacks the massive storage capacity needed to smooth out renewable energy fluctuations. Building centralized battery storage facilities is expensive and time-consuming.
So yes, we have an increasingly unstable grid and a vast network of underutilized EV batteries.
Product / Service 📦
Tether EV is creating AI-powered software that transforms private electric vehicles into a decentralized battery network that stabilizes the grid.
Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) Integration: Tether's white-label software integrates directly with EV manufacturer backends to unlock the existing battery capacity in parked vehicles.
Seamless Process: Unlike user-facing apps that require driver interaction, Tether operates behind the scenes through direct integration with existing charging infrastructure via APIs, ensuring broad compatibility with millions of vehicles while drivers go about their day.
Extra Revenue and Data: Tether places a bid to sell energy to the grid and then gets paid by grid operators for helping stabilize the grid with this massive EV network acting as a virtual battery. Tether then shares a part of that revenue with EV manufacturers and charging point operators. They also provide grid operators with data insights used for grid-level demand forecasting.
Smart Charging Optimization: Their platform solves the massive challenge of predicting EV movement patterns, enabling real-time control and optimization of vehicle charging and discharging cycles to participate in grid balancing markets.
Everyone wins: The grid and its users, EV manufacturers and Tether.
Market 🌐
There’s a €50B+ opportunity in grid balancing markets across the EU and US. The macro picture is clear: over 9 million EVs already on EU roads (expected to surpass 130M by 2035), more than 630,000 public chargers (set to triple this decade), and €14 trillion in climate infrastructure investment needed to hit net-zero.
Other Key Players
Nuuve 🇺🇸: Targets EV fleets and offers vehicle-to-grid services for grid balancing market participation.
Tibber 🇳🇴🇸🇪: Provides dynamic electricity pricing and smart charging, mainly for reducing electricity costs in homes.
Flower 🇸🇪 and Fever Energy 🇸🇪: Aggregate flexibility from various assets, including EVs, batteries, and renewables for market participation.
They also compete with stationary storage solutions but those have high capital expenditures and limited scalability.
Tether is different because it focuses on private EVs rather than fleets, scales fast by having direct partnerships with car manufacturers and chargers, and their revenue sharing model ensures recurring revenue for clients.
Founding Story 🦄
Tether was founded in 2023 in Barcelona by Luis Medina Rivas (CEO). He began his career in the US at General Electric as a gas turbine control systems engineer before moving to solar engineering, where he learned about grid intermittency and balancing challenges. He experienced firsthand how many solar projects were getting cancelled due to stability concerns.
One day he saw a huge fleet of cars parked under the solar panels - realizing that these cars are essentially just batteries on wheels, presenting a huge untapped capacity for the grid. He got a master’s in renewable energy engineering, focusing on electricity markets and energy storage, and wrote his thesis on using EVs for grid balancing in Sweden- that was the foundation for Tether.
The company has just raised $1.5M and they have ongoing pilots in Sweden and Germany.
Top Impact Stats 📈
1. Their software reduces battery degradation by up to 30% via optimized charging.
2. By stabilizing the grid with their solution instead of with fossil fuels (what’s normally done), Tether saves an average of 3,700 metric tons of CO2 emissions per MW over the lifetime of a car (400 homes’ yearly electricity use).
3. They can generate up to 2 euros per car per day for the EV manufacturers (varies by country, energy mix of the grid, etc.)
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