In the Pacific Northwest, where the grid frays into long extension cords feeding remote communities, the default backup is still a diesel generator humming away at a few dollars a gallon plus shipping. Skip Technology, a six-year-old startup in Portland, thinks the right answer is a tank of liquid electrolyte and a stack the size of a shipping container, sized to run for anywhere from four to more than one hundred hours [Portland Business Journal, May 2024]. It is a quiet bet, made by two astrophysicists, and it is starting to attract the kind of patient capital that hardware on this scale actually needs.
The company was founded in 2018 by Brennan Gantner and Benjamin Brown, both holding PhDs in astrophysics, with Brown specializing in fluid dynamics [Skip Tech About Us, retrieved 2026] [Skip Tech team page, retrieved 2024]. Their wedge is a novel flow battery aimed at long-duration stationary storage, the slice of the market that lithium handles poorly because the chemistry gets expensive fast once you need to hold energy for more than about four hours [Continuous Solutions, Nov 2024]. The customer profile Skip keeps describing is specific: remote and agricultural sites where power is intermittent, expensive, and currently leans on diesel [BusinessWire, Nov 2024]. That is not a hypothetical market. It is every tribal community, every off-grid irrigator, and every microgrid operator who has ever stared at a fuel invoice and wondered if there is another way.
The bet
Flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes held in external tanks, which means power and energy can be sized independently. Want more hours? Add tank volume. That decoupling is what makes the chemistry interesting once you push past the four-hour duration where lithium-ion stops penciling. Skip has not publicly disclosed its exact chemistry, but the framing in its own materials and partner press is consistent: a large-scale, long-duration alternative to lithium, designed for stationary deployment rather than vehicles [Continuous Solutions, Nov 2024] [Portland Business Journal, May 2024].
The November 2024 partnership with Continuous Solutions, a Portland power-electronics shop, is the most concrete product signal so far. Continuous handles the inverters and controls; Skip brings the storage stack. Together they are pitching reliable clean electricity to remote and agricultural communities [BusinessWire, Nov 2024]. That is a small but real go-to-market wedge, because flow batteries do not sell themselves: they sell as a system, with power conversion, controls, and a service contract bundled in.
Why it could be big
The broader storage market is moving in Skip's direction. KNKX cited 30 percent annual growth in renewable energy storage with roughly $750 million in yearly revenue at the time of reporting [KNKX Public Radio, Apr 2024]. The long-duration slice, four hours and beyond, is where utilities, tribes, and industrial off-takers are now writing real checks because solar and wind without enough storage simply do not displace the diesel or the gas peaker.
The most interesting thing about Skip's cap table is who showed up. Puyallup Tribal Enterprises, the business arm of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, led the company's funding and took a board seat [KNKX Public Radio, Apr 2024] [Tribal Business News]. That is not symbolic capital. Tribes own meaningful chunks of land, generation assets, and load in exactly the geographies where long-duration storage is most valuable, and they tend to invest on horizons that match how long it takes to commercialize a battery. South Sound Business reported plans for local manufacturing in the region [South Sound Biz], which, if it materializes, gives Skip both a customer and a production base in one relationship.
Total disclosed funding stands at roughly $5 million across 2024 activity [Center of Excellence for Clean Energy]. That is seed-scale for software and pre-seed-scale for hardware, but it is enough to finish a pilot stack and prove duration claims in the field.
A back of envelope
Consider a remote community burning 100 gallons of diesel a day for power. At roughly 13.7 kWh of usable electricity per gallon after a generator's 35 percent efficiency, that is about 1,370 kWh per day, or call it a 200 kW load running flat. At $5 per delivered gallon (modest for fly-in or barge-in sites), the annual fuel bill alone is around $182,000, and the carbon load is roughly 370 metric tons of CO2 per year. Pair a 500 kWh solar array with a 24-hour Skip stack sized to ride through cloudy stretches, and even at an installed cost of $400 per kWh of storage (estimated, in line with public flow-battery benchmarks), the storage capex is roughly $200,000. Payback in fuel alone, ignoring the diesel maintenance bill, lands in the neighborhood of 18 to 30 months. That is the unit economics conversation Skip needs to win, one site at a time.
The team and traction
Gantner is CEO and co-founder [The Org, retrieved 2026]. Brown is co-founder and president, and the fluid-dynamics background is directly relevant to the flow-battery problem, which lives or dies on how electrolyte moves through a stack [Skip Tech team page, retrieved 2024]. The Puyallup Tribal Enterprises board seat gives the company an aligned, patient anchor investor [KNKX Public Radio, Apr 2024], and the Continuous Solutions partnership gives it a credible path to a deployable system rather than a science project [BusinessWire, Nov 2024].
What the bears say
The honest counterfactual is competition. ESS Inc., the publicly traded iron-flow battery maker, is also based in the Portland area and has been shipping commercial units for years with utility-scale customers and a head start measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. A seed-stage entrant going after the same long-duration category has to explain why its chemistry or system design is meaningfully cheaper or more durable. Skip's answer, implicit in its public materials, is to start in the remote and agricultural niche where ESS is less focused and where diesel, not lithium, is the real incumbent to beat [BusinessWire, Nov 2024]. Winning a beachhead of off-grid sites, then growing into utility-scale, is a recognizable hardware playbook. It worked for Tesla in cars. It can work in storage, but it requires capital discipline and a few reference deployments that hold up under independent measurement.
What to watch
Over the next twelve months, the milestones to track are straightforward: a first paid deployment with a Puyallup-affiliated site, the Continuous Solutions partnership maturing into a productized system with a published price per kWh, and the Series A round that almost always follows a credible flow-battery pilot. If Skip can publish a real duration curve from a real site, the conversation shifts from chemistry to economics, which is the conversation it wants to be having.
The incumbent Skip has to beat is not lithium. It is ESS Inc., the iron-flow battery company a few miles up the road, which has already convinced utilities that flow chemistry deserves a slot in the long-duration stack. Skip's job is to prove there is room for a second Portland flow battery in the same market, and that the second one knows something about remote sites the first one does not.