Three practice areas, one job
Mend Energy works on power projects, on hydrogen infrastructure, and on the technologies that go into both. The asset changes. The job does not: get the permit strategy right, get the engineering reviewed by someone who is not selling you the equipment, and settle the commercial terms before anyone spends money.
Behind-the-meter power
Generation on the customer’s side of the meter, for data centers and industrial loads that need power sooner than the interconnection queue will deliver it. We work the whole path: find the site, size the plant to the load, set emissions at the start so permitting runs on the quickest route available, and settle the commercial terms before capital moves.
The work covers site origination and powered land screening, gas to power feasibility and plant sizing, load ramp and phasing against the customer’s build schedule, behind the meter versus utility interconnection strategy, air permitting strategy and agency engagement, and owner side review of EPC and equipment proposals.
Density is part of the product. On a constrained infill site in the Bay Area we are getting 49 MW at roughly 100 MW per acre, inside the emissions limits.
Repositioning connected sites
The same job applied to land that is already energized. A peaker, a demand response fleet, a battery site, an underused renewable interconnection, a factory whose service outlived the plant. Different assets, one shared advantage over anything greenfield.
We start with the screen. What the interconnection actually supports at the meter, how much headroom the air permit has left, whether the land and the fiber cooperate. That comes back in weeks, and it comes back honest, including when the answer is that the site does not clear.
When it does clear, the position usually supports more than one path: a data center load, a generation build, a storage overlay, or a sale to someone who needs the capacity more than the buildings. From there it runs like any other project. Size the load to what the site supports, convert existing generation to backup duty, set the permit strategy, settle the terms. The difference is where you start.
Hydrogen infrastructure
Fueling stations and on-site production, worked from the owner’s side of the table. Hydrogen projects come together at the intersection of safety engineering, code compliance and incentive structure, and all three have to hold before the capital stack does.
The engineering work covers hydrogen safety plans, HAZOP facilitation and NFPA aligned design, leak detection and isolation strategy, and front-end engineering on station, storage and transfer concepts. We review vendor and integrator designs on the owner’s behalf and carry the technical record through agency and fire authority review.
The commercial work runs alongside it: positioning compression, storage and dispensing equipment for the 48E investment tax credit, and building the LCFS credit position, including hydrogen refueling infrastructure and fast charging infrastructure capacity credits, into the project economics from the start.
Technology development
We work with companies bringing power generation and thermal technologies from prototype to deployed asset. That means defining the application, reviewing the engineering from the owner’s side, finding the sites and the permit path the technology actually fits, and building the incentive and credit position that makes the first commercial units financeable.
Much of this is funded work. We develop and support programs through DOE and ARPA-E, CEC solicitations and CARB pathways, and we bring the LCFS credit position into the model early enough for it to shape the design.
The ground we find most interesting right now is where cooling meets generation. A data center is a power problem and a heat rejection problem at the same time, and the same site, the same permit and the same capital solve both. We work both sides, and we can introduce owners to advanced refrigeration and cooling technologies we already work with.
The same work runs for investors. We give venture and infrastructure funds an independent technical read on generation, storage and thermal companies: whether the engineering holds up, what it takes to get a first unit sited and permitted, and which incentives the model is actually entitled to claim.
Where are you in the project?
A site, a technology, a term sheet. The earliest questions are the cheapest ones to get right.