Volt Harbor to Debut Battery-Agnostic MAC-BESS Storage Platform at The Battery Show North America 2026

Volt Harbor to Showcase Software-Defined Energy Platform at The Battery Show North America 2026

The company will demonstrate MAC-BESS™, its battery-agnostic technology that cuts battery project costs by half and optimizes how power flows through data centers and the grid

ANN ARBOR, Mich., October 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Volt Harbor, the Ann Arbor–based software-defined energy startup that publicly launched in May, will exhibit at The Battery Show North America 2026 hosted at Huntington Place in Detroit, October 12–15. Volt Harbor will be at Booth #6212, demonstrating how its MAC-BESS™ platform is a solution for the entire front-end power stack, from the grid to the data center, in a single battery-agnostic system.

Grid resilience depends less on how much storage gets built than on how intelligently power moves through it, and the layer with the most untapped potential is the power electronics. Unlike traditional energy infrastructure, which requires expensive hardware overhauls to adapt to new needs, Volt Harbor’s platform uses software changes to adapt Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) dynamically. This supports any input or output, including new battery chemistries and “second-life” EV batteries, inside a single unified system. The result is roughly 40-50% lower capital and operating costs, 50% less physical footprint, and ultrafast energy response with no single point of failure.

This year’s Battery Show comes at a pivotal moment for storage project economics. Today, a storage project is a fifteen-year asset bought through a day-one procurement process, and the architecture chosen determines almost everything that follows. Systems that manage their batteries as a single block age at the pace of their worst modules. This is why most projects that hold up, and those that get written down, were effectively decided long before commissioning. MAC-BESS™ takes a different approach: it manages every battery module independently, extending usable life while needing fewer batteries and letting operators augment or replace with whatever supply is available at the time, and making units swappable without taking the system offline.

Dr. Al-Thaddeus Avestruz, CEO of Volt Harbor, said:

The Battery Show is where the people actually building the next generation of battery supply, infrastructure, and end-use storage systems come together, which makes us excited to be on the show floor,

“The industry has spent a decade optimizing the batteries themselves. The layer that almost nobody has really touched is the power electronics architecture, and that is where the next step-change in cost, flexibility, and project life actually comes from.”

Volt Harbor’s platform is deploying a utility pilot in 2027 with DTE Energy, Michigan’s largest utility, where second-life EV batteries will buffer high-power EV charging events that exceed local grid capacity. The same architecture is being readied for data center deployments, where AI loads swing energy facilities from 30% to full rated capacity within milliseconds and back. The legacy power stack was never designed to absorb this pattern, and it’s part of why grid interconnection queues in major data center markets now run past four years. Storage and power electronics that absorb those spikes let the grid supply the average, which means more compute for every megawatt of existing interconnection, or a smaller interconnection that clears the queue sooner.

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Volt Harbor to Showcase Software-Defined Energy Platform at The Battery Show North America 2026, source