Italian clean energy co. selects The Woodlands for North American HQ

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AB Energy USA is moving into The Woodlands Towers at The Waterway. Photo courtesy AB Energy USA.

An Italian renewable energy company has picked The Woodlands for its North American headquarters.

AB Energy USA will occupy about 11,000 square feet in The Woodlands Towers at The Waterway. The company expects to add about 45 jobs in The Woodlands this year. Beginning in 2027, AB Energy USA will add another 30 jobs over a five-year period.

The new headquarters will be the corporate and governance hub for all of AB Energy’s North American subsidiaries. AB Energy, an arm of Italy-based AB, supplies renewable natural gas systems for industrial, commercial and data center customers. AB has operated in the U.S. since 2014.

“Establishing our North American headquarters in the Energy Capital of the World is a strategic step in AB’s long-term commitment to the U.S. market,” Paolo Ruggeri, North American CEO for AB Energy USA, said in a news release. “Houston gives us access to world-class engineering and energy talent, and strengthens our ability to attract and grow a high-performing team.”

Jevon Gibb, CEO of The Woodlands Area Economic Development Partnership, said several markets competed for AB Energy’s North American headquarters.

“AB’s decision to establish its North American headquarters here demonstrates The Woodlands’ competitiveness for both international companies and energy sector leaders,” Gibb said.

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Plus Power, which recently relocated its HQ to Houston, has moved into a larger office space. Image via cushmanwakefield.com

Energy storage startup moves into larger Houston-area space, plans to grow team

expansion plans

A Northern California-born energy storage startup has established its headquarters in The Woodlands.

Plus Power, which develops battery systems designed to store backup power for electric grids, recently signed a lease for nearly 7,000 square feet at Three Hughes Landing in The Woodlands. The company previously was based in coworking space at the Rayford Office Park in Spring.

The company, founded in 2018, shifted its headquarters from San Francisco to the Houston area last year.

“We chose The Woodlands for its beauty, and walkable access to great nearby hotels, restaurants, and healthy groceries,” says Brandon Keefe, CEO of Plus Power. “A Houston base reflects our deep focus on the Texas market, as we are investing nearly $1 billion in several projects here that will be online by the first quarter of 2024, with more in [the works] behind that.”

About 40 employees work from Plus Power’s new office in The Woodlands. Across North America, the company employs about 130 people, including several in Austin. As of July 10, the startup listed nine job openings.

Plus Power develops, owns, and operates utility-scale systems that store energy in huge lithium-ion batteries during low-demand periods. In times of peak demand, power providers can tap into this stored energy.

“Standalone energy storage is rapidly transforming the U.S. energy markets, because it is cheaper than new natural gas plants, faster to build than fossil peakers or transmission, and able to perform diverse energy services,” the company explains in its job postings.

Peakers are backup power plants that run on fossil fuels.

One of Plus Power’s storage facilities is the 100-megawatt Gambit project, which opened two years ago in Angleton. The nearly eight-acre facility supports power supplies for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which runs the power grid for 90 percent of Texas.

The company says the Angleton facility has fed backup energy to ERCOT during this year’s and last year’s heatwaves, as well as last December’s winter freeze.

The Gambit facility might ring a bell with some folks in the Houston area. In January 2022, Austin-based automaker Tesla unveiled a backup power storage facility in Angleton. Plus Power bought the project from Tesla in June 2022.

Plus Power’s development pipeline contains 10 gigawatts’ worth of energy storage projects in 28 states and Canada. That includes massive projects on tap for Hawaii and Arizona.

Last November, Plus Power announced it had secured $219 million in debt financing for construction of the 185-megawatt Kapolei project on a roughly eight-acre site in Oahu, Hawaii. The facility will be tied to Hawaiian Electric’s power grid. Mizuho Securities USA and KeyBank led the financing.

This April, Plus Power held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Sierra Estrella project in Tolleson, a Phoenix suburb. The 250-megawatt system will serve Salt River Project (SRP), a utility provider in the Phoenix area. The roughly 11-acre Tolleson facility is set to open next year, as is another Plus Power project for SRP — the 90-megawatt Superstition facility in Gilbert, another Phoenix suburb.

As its development pipeline demonstrates, Plus Power is firmly plugged into the fast-growing energy storage market.

According to the Houston-based energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association, the U.S. energy storage market installed a record-breaking 4.8 gigawatts of capacity in 2022. This year, that number is projected to approach 75 gigawatts.

In a March 2023 news release, John Hensley, the clean power group’s vice president of research and analytics, says the U.S. market “is on a rapid growth curve and is already a key component of building a resilient grid that supports abundant clean energy.”

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Tesla unveils new Roadster sports car, which can thrust itself in the air

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Tesla has unveiled its new Roadster sports car, which can thrust itself in the air, among other engineering bells and whistles. But drivers shouldn't expect to take it for a spin anytime soon.

Elon Musk's electric car company rolled out its second-generation Roadster at a Thursday event, showing off a set of cold gas thrusters and a “multi-mode” suction system that can fling the car in the air for short spurts and spin the vehicle mid-flight.

“Turns out the future does have flying cars,” Musk, Tesla's CEO, wrote on his social media platform X shortly after.

That future could be a ways off, however, given the regulatory hurdles for flying vehicles and the tangle of state rules that still need to be met.

“I’m not sure every state is going to allow a driver in the middle of traffic to suddenly elevate himself and fly," said David Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor and former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “There is going to be a long process to let anything like that on a road.”

Thursday's event was hosted at the Texas rocket testing and development center for SpaceX — Musk's publicly-traded rocket company — and Tesla's executives noted that they “borrowed” some SpaceX technology to get the new Roadster in the air. Beyond quick jumps and flips, Tesla also said the car can accelerate from zero to 60 miles (96.6 km) an hour in less than a second.

This launch arrived after years of delays and anticipation around the new Roadster — and Tesla shares climbed in morning trading on Friday before falling amid a sell-off in companies tied to artificial intelligence.

The wait isn't completely over. Musk said production for consumers won't begin until 2028. Tesla also didn't immediately set a price tag on its latest EV.

Tesla was taking reservations for Roadster “rocket” car purchases on its website Friday morning, though the fine print said there was no guarantee when the vehicle would be delivered — or whether it would be delivered at all.

Bryant Walker Smith, former vice chair of a Department of Transportation advisory group on innovation, was unimpressed — though he did note Musk's ability to keep Tesla's stock high.

“This was a demonstration of a one-off car using a technology around for many years and will not be coming to public roads in 2028," said Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. “Tesla pretty uniquely has been able to sell itself on a future that is an order of magnitude greater than reality.”

Musk has repeatedly said that the future of driving will be autonomous — and Austin-based Tesla has focused much of its business on building out self-driving features for its vehicles and, more recently, launching its own (still limited) robotaxi business.

But the company maintains that the Roadster will be made to have humans behind the wheel, calling the EV the “best of the last human-driven cars.”

Thursday's demo was technically autonomous “to make sure we don’t kill anyone,” Musk noted. But long-term, he said, the new Roadster will be “the only manually driven car that Tesla makes.”

“This is not necessarily a safety-optimized car,” Musk later added, met by laughter from the audience. But “it takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10.”

Tesla's first Roadster was launched back in 2008. And in 2018, Musk went as far as placing one on a rocket — with a mannequin dubbed “Starman” in the driver's seat — and launching it into space.

Again, the second-generation Roadster isn't immediately hitting the market. And whether the ambitious new vehicle boosts the company's bottom line remains to be seen.

In second-quarter earnings reported over the summer, Tesla's profits fell as the company spent more on research and development for its robotaxi and robotics businesses — which cut into money made from an otherwise sharp increase in vehicle sales. Net income totaled $1.11 billion for the period, while revenue climbed to $28.24 billion.

TEX-E names New Climate Ventures as latest expert in residence

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Texas Exchange for Energy & Climate Entrepreneurship (TEX-E) has named its latest expert in residence.

The Houston-based energy transition nonprofit recently announced that New Climate Ventures will join the newly established program. The Expert-in-Residence partnership aims to connect TEX-E Fellows with "the people and organizations shaping the future of energy and entrepreneurship," the nonprofit previously announced.

Taylor Chapman, an investment principal at New Climate Ventures, sits on TEX-E's board of directors. New Climate Ventures invests in early-stage startups building next-gen technologies in the energy, materials and fuels sectors. The venture capital firm's portfolio includes Houston-based clean energy startups like Solidec, Syzygy Plasmonics and Rheom Materials.

“If you know me, you know that I'm passionate about ensuring that my beloved hometown, Houston, is the energy capital of the future — not just of the past," Chapman said in a LinkedIn post. "TEX-E is building a key piece to ensure that's the case: a strong pipeline of graduate and college students immersed [and] versed in the world of energy [and] climate entrepreneurship."

TEX-E says the partnership with New Climate Ventures will allow its fellows opportunities to learn from investors that work with emerging companies and understand how they evaluate new technologies.

TEX-E announced Houston-based geothermal unicorn Fervo Energy and venture capital firm Mercury Fund as its first experts in residence in August. At the time, it said the partnerships would allow its fellows to network and work with Tim Latimer, CEO of Fervo; Sarah Jewett, COO of Fervo; and Blair Garrou, managing partner of Mercury Fund.

The nonprofit was founded in 2022 through partnerships with MIT Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship and Greentown Labs. It works with university students from six schools: Rice University, University of Houston, Prairie View A&M University, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University and MIT.

Rice University spinouts named among 50 top cleantech companies to watch

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Two Rice University spinouts, Coflux Purification and DexMat, appear on a new list of the world’s 50 cleantech companies to watch.

Cleantech Group’s 2026 Cleantech 50 to Watch list recognizes early-stage companies “creating groundbreaking solutions to address some of the world’s most pressing environmental and sustainability challenges.”

Cleantech Group, a market research, consulting, and events company, selects the 50 honorees based on insights from analysts and early-stage innovators, along with public nominations.

Destroying “forever chemicals”

Coflux, founded in 2024, offers an onsite treatment system that captures and destroys manufactured “forever chemicals”—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—in water and wastewater. It’s a member of Greentown Houston.

Alec Ajnsztajn, CEO; Jeremy Daum, chief technology officer; and Dana Vazquez, chief commercial officer, co-founded Coflux. Ajnsztajn and Daum earned doctoral degrees from Rice, and Vazquez earned an MBA from the university.

Coflux spun out of Rice labs directed by professors Rafael Verduzco and Pulickel Ajayan.

Last year, Coflux received a $175,000 grant from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The startup has also raised more than $500,000 in non-dilutive funding, including $80,000 awarded in 2024 by Rice’s One Small Step Grant program.

Promoting an alternative to copper

DexMat, founded in 2015, produces carbon nanotube products such as fibers, yarns, cables, and fabric. The company’s products address demand for materials that can reduce carbon emissions, according to CB Insights.

Its main product, Galvorn, is a copper alternative made of carbon nanotube fibers. CB Insights says Galvorn is engineered to be lighter and stronger than traditional conductive materials like carbon and steel. It’s used in industries such as energy, aerospace, defense, automotive, consumer electronics, and health care.

DexMat emerged from Matteo Pasquali’s Carbon Lab at Rice. Pasquali, co-founder of DexMat, co-invented the company’s technology with the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Rick Smalley. Smalley was a professor of chemistry, physics, and astronomy at Rice.

Pasquali is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, chemistry, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice. He co-founded DexMat with Rice graduate Dmitri Tsentalovich, the company’s director of product innovation.

Earlier this year, DexMat raised $5 million in seed funding from Non Sibi Ventures, Governance Partners, Tailwind Futures, BetterWay, Capital Factory, and other investors. The company also secured $3 million in non-dilutive funding.

In 2023, DexMat raised $3 million in a pre-seed round led by Shell Ventures.

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