Green Charge Networks has closed a $56 million capital raise. K Road DG is providing funding and strategic management services to the company to enable them to accelerate deployment of GreenStation, under Green Charge’s Power Efficiency Agreement (PEASM). According to the company, the funding round is the largest amount of capital raised by any company in the intelligent energy storage space.

Green Charge offers an energy storage product that they say is proven to reduce power demand charges for commercial and industrial customers on their monthly utility bills. Green Charge’s GreenStation has been successfully installed by 7-Eleven, Walgreens, UPS, school campuses, and cities across New York and California. Now with the PEASM, Green Charge will own and operate energy storage assets deployed at customer sites, while providing the customer with a powerful combination of utility bill savings, zero capital and maintenance costs, and mitigated performance risk.

“Power efficiency is the next frontier in energy savings,” said Vic Shao, CEO at Green Charge. “We plan to leverage the alliance and financing from K Road DG to scale our company’s deployments and continue our customer-centric innovations.”

Green Charge Network explains that similar to a solar Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), the PEASM shifts the performance burden onto Green Charge as the asset owner instead of the customer. This type of financing model was key to spreading distributed solar around the globe, but has not been available in the energy storage market until now. This financing allows Green Charge to serve the broadest cross-section of the market.

“We are excited to enter into this strategic alliance and to provide growth capital that will drive deployment of Green Charge’s innovative technology to C&I customers on a commercial scale,” added William Kriegel, CEO of K Road DG. “K Road DG believes that Green Charge’s technology solutions respond directly to a global demand for intelligent energy storage.”

Market research firm IHS predicts that the energy storage market is expected to grow to an annual installation rate of over 40 GW by 2022 — from only 0.34 GW in 2012 and 2013.