power move

Solar energy co. expands Houston office to support growth

Spruce's home solar assets and contracts grew about 50 percent over the past year, which represents 25,000 rooftops. Photo via Pexels

Distributed solar energy asset company Spruce Power Holding Corp. announced the expansion of its operating headquarters in Houston, which will support business functions.

Technology, asset operations, customer Support, and billings and collections teams will be housed in the newly expanded office located at Two Memorial City Plaza at 820 Gessner Road in Houston. The expansion of its Houston office will be over 40,000 square feet. Spruce is one of the largest tenants in the Memorial City Plaza office complex.

"This announcement comes on the heels of our corporate headquarters' relocation in Denver, with both expansions and the execution of a value-creating move from California to our long-term work homes,” Christian Fong, CEO of Spruce said in a news release.

“Houston is our largest employment base, and being able to add high-paying jobs to our Houston location underpins our commitment to the community and continued growth in Texas," he continues.

In 2019, Denver-based Spruce Power built a residential energy services solution platform for the distributed generation (DG) solar sector. Spruce's home solar assets and contracts grew about 50 percent over the past year, which represents 25,000 rooftops.

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A View From HETI

The startup says its energy-as-a-service offering lowers power costs, boosts power reliability and decreases emissions. Photo courtesy Kanin Energy

Kanin Energy, a member of the Greentown Labs climatech and energy incubator in Houston, recently raised as much as $100 million in capital to grow its energy-as-a-service platform.

S2G Investments led a round of up to $50 million, and the Canada Growth Fund chipped in an additional $50 million. The money will primarily support Kanin’s development and operation of waste-heat-to-power projects.

Kanin—founded in 2020 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada—builds and runs onsite power assets for large-scale energy users. The startup says its energy-as-a-service offering lowers power costs, boosts power reliability and decreases emissions.

The company operates a waste-heat-to-power project at Ohio’s University of Dayton. The project supplies zero-emission electricity.

Kanin has a pipeline of projects totaling about 50 megawatts of capacity. This includes a waste-heat-to-power plant at the Phillips 66 Mewbourn gas-processing plant near Greeley, Colorado.

“Kanin was built on the belief that industrial facilities already hold the solution to their own energy challenges, they just need the right partner to execute,” Janice Tran, CEO of Kanin, who is based in Houston, said in a release. “At a time when power costs continue to rise, [our] solutions are an important tool for our industrial customers to manage their costs, operations, and emissions.”

Marisa Sweeney, principal at S2G, says waste heat is a largely underused resource for lowering power costs, alleviating grid congestion and improving power reliability.

The waste-heat-to-power process captures thermal energy from industrial activities and converts it to electricity. This happens without using extra fuel or generating more emissions.

Kanin says up to 58 percent of energy consumed by industrial processes is lost as waste heat. This heat winds up in the atmosphere at thousands of facilities in North America, including oil-and-gas operations, cement plants, and steel mills, the startup says.

Kanin was founded in 2020 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It opened offices at Greentown Labs Houston in July 2022.

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