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Batteries do not run themselves. A large storage system sitting beside a power plant or a solar farm needs a layer of software to decide when to charge, when to discharge, and how to respond to the grid around it. That gap between the hardware and the intelligence guiding it is the reason behind an agreement announced today between two U.S. energy companies that each handle one half of the problem.
Eos Energy Enterprises, Inc. (NASDAQ: EOSE) builds long duration battery systems, and WATTMORE writes the software that operates them. Under the new arrangement, the two firms will combine WATTMORE’s Intellect Operate platform, which handles energy management, plant control, and monitoring, with Eos’s Z3 storage systems and their built-in operating software, known as DawnOS. The agreement is non-exclusive, meaning Eos stays free to work with other software providers and WATTMORE with other hardware makers.
To understand why this matters, it helps to know what each company actually does. Eos, based in the U.S., designs and manufactures storage systems built around zinc rather than the lithium used in most batteries today. Its selling point is a chemistry that does not catch fire and can hold energy for long stretches, which suits utilities and industrial customers that need power available for hours at a time rather than minutes. WATTMORE, a Denver company once known as Nikola Power, focuses on the control side: software that dispatches power, tracks the health of each battery, and manages how a system interacts with the wider electricity network.
The two layers are meant to work together. DawnOS looks after the batteries themselves, monitoring and tuning performance at the cell and module level, while WATTMORE’s software sits above it, handling how and when the whole system delivers energy and talks to the grid. The companies also note that the hardware involved meets U.S. sourcing standards, a growing concern for buyers who want domestic content in their equipment.
This is not the first time the two have worked side by side. They previously teamed up on a 3 MW/12 MWh storage project for Lincoln Electric System, a utility in Nebraska, which combined Eos batteries with WATTMORE’s controls. That earlier project gave both sides a working example of their technology running together, and the new agreement extends that relationship into a broader, ongoing option for Eos customers.
Executives framed the deal in practical terms. WATTMORE’s founder and chief executive, Jonathan Postal, described storage as something that only works when the batteries, the controls, and the software behave as a single operating environment, and said the collaboration brings together complementary pieces of that stack. Nathan Kroeker, Eos’s chief commercial officer, said the company can work with a range of energy management systems, and that the WATTMORE tie gives customers one more choice when they build a project.
For a customer weighing a storage purchase, the appeal is easy to follow. Buying a battery and separately sourcing the software to run it can mean stitching together parts from vendors who have never worked together. An agreement like this offers a combination that has already run in the field, which can take some of the guesswork out of getting a system going. Whether that turns into more sales for either company will depend on how many projects actually adopt the pairing.
The wider backdrop is a U.S. market hungry for ways to store electricity as more solar and wind come online. Neither company disclosed financial terms, and the agreement is a framework rather than a fixed order, so its real weight will show up over time in the projects that use it. What the announcement makes clear is that the storage business is no longer only about the battery in the box. It is increasingly about the software deciding what that battery should do.
