The BESS Development Firm

Smart companies are adding battery storage to their energy strategy. We provide the development team, the operating system, and the technical rigor to get those projects permitted, financed, and ready to build.

WE PLUG IN. WE DON’T TAKE OVER

Carina Energy is an Owner’s Representative firm that manages the entire development process for battery energy storage, from site selection to Notice to Proceed.
We work alongside your team, not instead of it. Whether you are a data center operator securing reliable power, a property owner turning facilities into energy assets, an asset owner adding storage to an existing solar facility, an infrastructure fund building a development portfolio, or a landowner unlocking the value of a site near transmission, you already have people, processes, and vendor relationships that work.
We don’t replace them. We add the battery storage expertise your existing team doesn’t have, and we run the development process so your people can focus on what they do best.
Battery storage development is not like other infrastructure. The technology you select determines your fire safety requirements. The fire safety requirements determine your site layout. The site layout determines whether your project is buildable at all. Get that sequence wrong, and you redesign after you’ve already spent. Get it right, and permits move, financing closes, and construction starts on schedule.
We exist because that sequence requires specialized management — and most organizations building battery storage for the first time don’t have it in-house. They shouldn’t have to.

We Deliver Five Capabilities That, Together, Give You
A Complete BESS Development Machine.

An Expert BESS Development Team

Carina gives you a multidisciplinary team of seasoned specialists spanning battery engineering, fire protection, grid interconnection, permitting and entitlements, civil and site engineering, and environmental compliance, the disciplines that determine whether a battery storage project gets built or stalls. These are practitioners who have permitted and constructed utility-scale battery projects across multiple grid regions, jurisdictions, and equipment platforms.

That team, working as an extension of yours, is the first layer. And for many organizations exploring battery storage for the first time, it’s the most valuable one.

Local Execution. National Expertise.

For land origination, local people represent your project from the first conversation, which lowers your costs, improves your odds, and builds community relationships that pay off when the permit hearing arrives. For permitting, we use local engineering firms. The people who know the local planning commission, the building department, and the fire marshal. These are relationships that cannot be replicated from a national headquarters.

Then, on top of that local foundation, we layer national specialists for fire protection and battery technology, the areas where experience across dozens of jurisdictions is what prevents costly mistakes.

Local execution for permits. National expertise for risk. That combination is the second layer.

Codified Scope. Clean Balance Sheet.

We organize the entire development process using a formal Work Breakdown Structure spanning nine technical disciplines and six development phases. Every consultant or vendor working on your project receives a scope of work, drafted by Carina, with clear deliverables, phase gates, and budget limits before they begin.

They sign it. They insure it. Your balance sheet stays clean.

This isn’t just project management. It’s a liability architecture designed to protect the project owner.

For organizations whose boards, investors, or lenders scrutinize how development risk is allocated, this structure answers the question before it’s asked.

A Data Room That Answers Before They Ask

We produce a data room with up to 140 documents, structured specifically to answer the questions that lenders, tax equity partners, and independent engineers are going to ask during due diligence.

Permits, engineering studies, safety analyses, environmental clearances, interconnection agreements, and expert reports.

Your project finance due diligence, answered before the question is asked. That’s the fourth layer.

Visibility Into Every Task and Every Dollar

We built a project management platform from the ground up, purpose-built for battery storage development.

Every task and deliverable is tracked in real time with predecessor logic, critical path analysis, milestone gates, and dashboards your team can access anytime. Nothing advances to the next phase without a gate review. You always have a current view of where things stand — no waiting for a weekly status email, no chasing down your project manager.

We also plug into every project-related communication channel — emails, messages, and meeting notes — through customer service technology that captures and routes every exchange, so nothing gets lost between the people doing the work and the people who need to know. 

PROPRIETARY MARKET INTELLIGENCE

Every engagement we manage is informed by intelligence tools we built in-house — because the data our projects required didn’t exist in the market. These are not third-party subscriptions. They are purpose-built systems we developed and maintain so that every decision is grounded in current reality.
BESS Moratorium Monitor
We track battery storage restrictions across hundreds of local jurisdictions nationwide, identifying where development roadblocks exist before they cost you time and capital.
Before we screen a site or negotiate an option, we already know whether the local government has moved to restrict or ban battery storage projects in that community.
OEM FEOC Intelligence Tracker
We map the battery equipment supplier landscape, FEOC compliance status, domestic manufacturing capacity, trade policy exposure, and supply chain positioning, so that procurement decisions reflect current market conditions, not outdated assumptions.
When federal policy shifts or a manufacturer’s compliance status changes, we know before it affects your project.
Desktop Permitting Screen
Our in-house Desktop Permitting Screen identifies every federal, state, and local permit a battery storage project requires including fire code jurisdiction, zoning classification, and community sentiment, before our clients sign an option.
Where most developers outsource this to subscription platforms, we built it in-house so permitting intelligence is available from day one of every engagement.
Interconnection Queue Tracker
We pull project data from all seven major U.S. grid operators on a weekly basis, identifying who is building energy storage projects, where they are building, and at what scale are those projects being deployed.
That intelligence shapes how we position your project in the queue and how we assess competitive dynamics at your point of interconnection.

Where We Come From

Carina Energy is named after “Project Carina”, the first grid-connected lithium-ion battery storage system in the United States, designed, developed, and commissioned in 2008, by members of our leadership team.
Since then, we have held leadership roles across every segment of the energy storage industry: developing multi-gigawatt battery portfolios for major power producers, deploying battery systems as equipment engineers, building the software that grid operators use to measure battery performance, and leading the digitalization of development processes for organizations managing hundreds of projects.
That range of experience, developer, equipment manufacturer, grid operator, and Owner’s Representative, is what allows us to see the full picture when a project hits a wall. We have been on every side of the table. We know where the problems start because we have been the ones who had to fix them.
We founded Carina to make that institutional capability available to any organization building battery storage, without the cost or delay of assembling a specialized team from scratch.

The BESS Development Lifecycle

Whether you need a full Development PMO or a targeted specific solution, we plug into your organization to provide immediate technical discipline

Tier 1 BESS Expertise

We bring the operating rigor of global energy leaders to your project. Methods forged by deploying gigawatts, not just megawatts.

Strategic Execution Across Key Sectors

Energy storage is not a commodity; it is a strategic asset with distinct drivers for different owners. Whether you are a Merchant Developer chasing speed or a Data Center demanding reliability, we adapt the Carina Operating System to the specific commercial goals of your capital.

The Carina Rules

Close The Execution Gap

Partner with Carina to bring discipline and technical rigor to your development pipeline