Two SpaceX alumni just told hyperscalers to forget gas turbines: Ambrosia Energy is selling solar-plus-battery power at $100/MWh, a direct 7% undercut on the $107/MWh Lazard benchmark for a new combined-cycle gas plant. And they can deliver it in 12 months from contract signing — not the five-to-seven-year backlog choking every gas turbine order today.
How Ambrosia Slices Cost to 1.5x Battery Cell Price
Co-founders Sara Spangelo (president) and Ben Longmier (CEO) didn't invent new chemistry. They engineered around the biggest cost driver in grid-scale storage: battery cycling speed. Most utility batteries cycle in two or four hours, putting heavy strain on the system. Ambrosia trickle-charges throughout the day and slowly discharges at night, which simplifies thermal management and cell balancing. That single change, plus other refinements, brought total system cost to just 1.5 times what they pay for the bare battery cells — well below the industry standard multiple.
“A power plant should be able to be built at any scale in 12 months from contract signing to power on,” Spangelo told TechCrunch. “Our ambition is to go to gigawatt scale.” The startup has already broken ground on a West Texas pilot plant, started construction in January 2026 (one month after incorporation), and turned on completed sections six weeks ago. Those sections have been running at 100% capacity since.
Trickle-Charging Batteries Beats Natural Gas on Reliability Too
Spangelo didn't mince words: “We’re also way more reliable than gas.” Combined-cycle gas plants require constant fuel supply and suffer from turbine degradation; Ambrosia's solar-plus-storage system, by contrast, is a distributed set of modules that can be deployed incrementally. Longmier likens the approach to deploying satellite constellations—launch four, learn, iterate. The startup plans to gradually replace off-the-shelf parts with custom designs, and is building a factory in Austin, Texas, to scale production.
Ambrosia initially self-funded, then took an undisclosed investment from DFJ Growth. The pair previously sold their IoT satellite startup Swarm to SpaceX and worked on Starlink, giving them firsthand experience with regulatory grind and fast iteration. “A lot of these challenges are very similar across regulatory, technical, go-to-market,” Spangelo said. “If we can bring some of that experience to this, hopefully we can have an impact.”
The real prize is the hyperscaler market. Spangelo says the system is “infinitely scalable” — Longmier mentioned partners with access to a million acres of land, potentially enabling a 30-gigawatt plant. For now, Ambrosia is starting at 20–30 megawatt deployments, but the target is clear: “Gigawatts by the end of the decade.” If they hit that, the gas-turbine backlog won't just be an inconvenience — it'll be an epitaph.
Source: Why two SpaceX alumni are betting on solar and batteries to power the AI craze
Domain: techcrunch.com
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