The Singapore Startup Rethinking Urban Energy Storage — and What the U.S. Can Learn

By Greennex Frontier | April 2025

The Pressure’s Building

Across the United States, cities are bracing for a future they’re not quite ready for. EVs are coming online faster than substations can handle. Summer heat waves are turning downtown office towers into peak-load threats. And across places like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, battery projects are getting delayed — not for lack of funding, but because there’s simply no safe place to put them.

The irony? The U.S. doesn’t have a storage problem. It has a storage fit problem.

Not all cities can afford gigawatt-scale lithium-ion farms tucked behind the fence line of some rural substation. What urban grids need is battery infrastructure that can operate inside the city, safely, cleanly, and durably — without triggering fire code, space constraints, or performance degradation.

That’s where an unlikely source of innovation — a compact island nation halfway across the world — may offer a sharper playbook.

A City That Built Storage for the System, Not Just the Market

Singapore, often called the “smartest city in the world,” isn’t just exporting fintech apps or autonomous vehicle policies — it’s actively building something more foundational: a power system designed to function under urban pressure. In a nation where land is scarce, critical loads are tightly concentrated, and failure is not an option, energy innovation isn’t about hitting scale — it’s about achieving system fit.

Rather than asking how to build the cheapest battery per kilowatt-hour, Singapore reframed the challenge: What kind of storage actually works inside a city? That mindset gave rise to a wave of solutions tuned to density, safety, and real-time responsiveness.

One of the most prominent examples is VFlowTech, a vanadium redox flow battery company that emerged to solve the constraints traditional lithium-ion can’t. Their long-duration, containerized systems are now deployed in logistics depots and smart estates, designed specifically for 8- to 12-hour discharge without fire risk or degradation. These are batteries built not for far-flung solar fields, but for tight, high-load urban environments — places where downtime isn’t just costly, it’s unacceptable.

Another company making waves is EcoFlow, which established its Asia-Pacific base in Singapore to expand its line of solar-integrated portable and backup battery systems. While best known globally for consumer-grade storage, EcoFlow’s regional pilots in Singapore are pushing into more critical territory — powering mobile energy hubs, telecom shelters, and community resiliency nodes. Their units are being tested in dense housing estates where traditional infrastructure upgrades are years away, yet load growth and outage risk are already real.

Sitting behind these deployments is a quieter but critical player: GridEdge Solutions, a Temasek-backed venture that focuses on intelligent coordination of distributed energy assets. Using edge AI, their platform enables rooftop solar, EV chargers, and mid-sized BESS to respond dynamically to load signals and grid stress — not as isolated equipment, but as a cooperative system. In a city-state where energy margins are razor-thin, GridEdge is helping turn everyday buildings into responsive grid actors.

This isn’t a story of a single breakthrough. It’s the result of a system-wide design: regulatory clarity, real urban testbeds, and startups building not just for scale, but for function. Singapore didn’t gamble on energy unicorns — it built conditions where the most operationally relevant ideas could prove themselves block by block, site by site.

For U.S. cities now facing grid strain, EV load pressure, and resilience mandates, this isn’t just a foreign success story. It’s a playbook — already in motion — for how to build a smarter, safer, and more adaptable energy system from the inside out.

Jolene Tan, Executive Director, North America, Enterprise Singapore told Greennex Frontier, “What we’re seeing in Singapore isn’t just about showcasing technology—it’s about proving how energy systems can adapt to dense, high-stakes urban environments. The U.S. market has unique challenges, but the core principles—resilience, integration, and smart deployment—translate directly. We see growing interest from American cities and partners who are looking not to import solutions, but to learn from the way we structure them.”

Lessons for the U.S.: It’s Not About What to Buy — It’s About How to Build

The U.S. doesn’t need to import Singapore’s technology. But it would do well to adopt Singapore’s logic — a way of thinking about storage not as a standalone asset, but as a function of how cities live, move, and consume energy.

What Singapore shows — through companies like VFlowTech, EcoFlow, and GridEdge Solutions — is that the challenge of urban energy storage isn’t about the battery itself. It’s about how storage fits into the ecosystem: zoning codes, infrastructure constraints, load profiles, and real-time control.

That means American cities need to start evaluating storage not just by cost, but by fitness to context. Can it sit safely in a building retrofit without triggering fire code? Can it ride through multiple deep cycles without failing? Can it flex with solar loads, EV spikes, and HVAC surges — and do it quietly, reliably, and in sync with the grid?

These are not hypothetical questions. They’re already being answered — in Singapore’s ports, housing estates, and smart energy districts — not with a single product, but with a system designed to adapt.

The U.S. doesn’t need another battery spec sheet. It needs a blueprint for integration — where modular chemistries, grid-aware software, and site-specific deployment plans come together as infrastructure, not accessories. That’s the real takeaway: the future of storage isn’t something you buy off a shelf. It’s something you build into the fabric of the city itself.

What Comes Next for Smart Grid Design — and for the U.S.

As electrification accelerates and climate risks intensify, U.S. cities are learning that the real question isn’t whether to deploy storage — it’s how to deploy the right kind, in the right places, under the right conditions.

The next frontier isn’t about stacking more gigawatts onto the grid. It’s about building urban-ready energy infrastructure that can operate within real-world constraints — where substations are already maxed out, fire codes are non-negotiable, and resilience isn’t a nice-to-have but a critical baseline.

That’s where Singapore offers a compelling shift in logic. Storage there isn’t treated as a bolt-on fix — it’s embedded into the architecture of the grid itself: modular, multi-functional, safety-first, and seamlessly aligned with how the city breathes, moves, and consumes energy.

Cities like Chicago, New Orleans, and Los Angeles are already encountering the same pressure points Singapore began solving a decade ago. And as U.S. utilities move from simply adding capacity to orchestrating complexity, the Singapore model — from chemistry diversity to digital coordination — is quickly becoming less of an outlier and more of a blueprint.

The future of energy storage in the U.S. won’t unfold on distant grid edges. It will be built into housing complexes, transit yards, telecom hubs, and medical centers — designed not just to store energy, but to perform under pressure, safely and intelligently. Singapore didn’t wait for its grid to break. It built one that could adapt and recover — from within. For U.S. cities on the same path, the lesson is clear: the future isn’t just about more batteries. It’s about systems that know how to use them.