Forty-one days. That's how long it took Moment Energy to go from announcing a new factory to actually opening one—a timeline that raises eyebrows in an industry where industrial buildouts typically drag on for months, if not years. On June 23, 2026, executives and local politicians gathered in Surrey, British Columbia, to cut the ribbon on what the company calls "Megafactory 1," a 60,000-square-foot facility dedicated entirely to a single bet: that the wave of retired electric vehicle batteries now beginning to pile up represents not waste, but opportunity.
The Vancouver-based startup isn't shy about the claim. This is, according to Moment, the world's largest facility dedicated to repurposing end-of-life EV batteries into grid storage systems—though independent benchmarking to confirm this designation remains limited. Whether that claim will hold up to scrutiny depends on how you measure—current capacity versus planned output, square footage versus throughput—but the speed of the build is undeniable.
Timing, as they say, is everything. Just weeks before the Surrey opening, on May 5, Moment closed a $40 million Series B round led by Evok Innovations, with Liberty Mutual Investments, W23 Global Fund, and Tokyo Gas-backed Acario joining in. Total capital raised now exceeds $100 million, and much of that fresh Series B cash went directly into Surrey real estate and the production lines that now occupy it.
Containers Full of Second Chances
The product itself is almost deceptively simple in concept: take batteries that automakers have pulled from vehicles—either because they've degraded past automotive use or the cars themselves have been retired—and repackage them into stationary energy storage. No exotic chemistry, no novel cell design. Just repurposing at scale. In practice, though, the process is more complex. These batteries arrive in wildly varying states of health from different manufacturers, requiring advanced battery management systems to integrate them into coherent, modular storage units.
Moment offers two configurations. The Half Luna crams 400 kWh and 200 kW of power into a standard 20-foot shipping container, delivering between two and four hours of discharge at 480 VAC. The Full Luna doubles the capacity—1 MWh and 500 kW—in a 40-foot box with the same voltage profile. Both are designed to be dropped onto a site, connected, and switched on with minimal fuss.
These aren't vaporware. The systems have cleared UL 1973, UL 9540, and UL 9540A certifications, the trio of safety benchmarks that the battery storage industry treats as table stakes. In October 2025, pv magazine USA reported that Moment had become the first repurposed battery system to achieve all three. The company also holds UL 1974 certification for its repurposing process itself—a designation it announced back in October 2023 as the first in North America to do so.
More recently, in May 2026, Moment disclosed that its battery management system had been recognized by Intertek as a UL 1973 component, meeting UL 60730-1 Annex H and UL 5500 requirements. That might sound like alphabet soup, but it addresses a real problem. Second-life batteries arrive from different automakers in wildly varying states of health, with no standardized battery management system. Moment's BMS is designed to bridge that gap, making it possible to integrate packs from different sources into a single, coherent storage unit.
Data Centers and Diesel Replacements
The rush to open Surrey wasn't driven by idle ambition. Demand for distributed power—especially among data centers, hospitals, and industrial facilities—has spiked. Everyone is hunting for storage that can shave peak demand charges or provide backup without paying for brand-new lithium-ion cells. McKinsey estimated in a May 2026 report that second-life batteries can run 30 to 70 percent cheaper than new systems, depending on configuration and market conditions. Perhaps more than the founders expected, that price gap is starting to matter.
Moment has been cultivating this market for years, sometimes in unexpected places. In July 2022, the company signed a supply agreement with Mercedes-Benz Energy, marking the German automaker's first such deal with a North American battery storage provider. Partnerships with Nissan North America followed, along with deployments for the Canada Department of National Defence and grid projects alongside Hydro Ottawa and BluWave-ai.
One deployment keeps showing up in Moment's materials: God's Pocket Resort, an off-grid lodge near Port Hardy, BC. The resort uses repurposed EV batteries to cut its diesel consumption—a use case that translates cleanly to industrial microgrids and remote operations where fuel costs bite hard.
Data center operators, in particular, are paying attention. Trade publication Telborg covered the Surrey opening in detail, noting the facility's focus on commercial and industrial customers facing power crunches. In April 2026, Moment announced a strategic partnership with Pulsenics, backed by a C$5 million grant from NGen, to accelerate battery diagnostics through something called the AccelaGrade QC workflow. Faster grading of incoming batteries means faster turnaround from retired pack to deployed system—and in this business, speed is margin.
The Gigawatt-Hour Question
As of the ribbon-cutting, Moment employs just over 80 people. The company has stated plans to add more than 100 direct jobs and over 1,000 indirect positions across British Columbia, though those figures are projections tied to future growth. The Surrey facility is designed to scale toward 1 GWh of annual battery energy storage output by 2030. That's a target, not current capacity, and Moment has not disclosed interim throughput figures for 2026 or 2027.
For context, Voltfang in Germany is aiming for 250 MWh per year by the end of 2026 and 1 GWh by around 2030. In late June 2026, battery-tech.net described the Aachen facility as "Europe's largest" second-life production plant. Moment's "world's largest" claim rests on current footprint and stated ambitions. Independent, apples-to-apples capacity comparisons across global repurposing factories remain sparse, so the superlative may be more aspirational than definitive—at least for now.
The company is also eyeing expansion beyond Canada. In October 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded Moment $20.3 million to establish a UL 1974-certified gigafactory in Taylor, Texas, with groundwork slated to begin in early 2025. That facility would mark Moment's first manufacturing presence in the United States, a market where second-life battery projects have largely been one-off deployments—B2U Storage Solutions' 25 MWh project in California, or GM and Redwood Materials' 7.2 MWh site in Michigan—rather than factory-scale repurposing operations.
Government Backing and Circular Math
The public sector has put real money behind this. Beyond the U.S. DOE grant, Moment secured over $4.9 million from Canada's PacifiCan program in August 2025 to scale production. The company also raised a $5 million debt facility from TD Innovation Partners in November 2025 and secured a strategic investment from Copec WIND Ventures the same month.
The opening ceremony drew MP Randeep Sarai (Surrey Centre), BC Minister Ravi Kahlon, and SFU Acting President Dilson Rassier—an indication that second-life batteries are being treated as infrastructure, not novelty. As millions of EVs reach end-of-life over the next decade, the volume of retired packs will accelerate dramatically. The grid needs storage, and it needs it at a price point that doesn't rely entirely on new cell production.
Moment Energy was founded in 2020 by Edward Chiang (CEO), Sumreen Rattan (COO), Gabriel Soares (CTO), and Gurmesh Sidhu (CPO). Early backing came from Version One Ventures, which led a $3.5 million seed round in November 2021. By January 2025, the company had raised a $15 million Series A co-led by Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund and Voyager Ventures.
Six weeks from announcement to opening is a breakneck pace for industrial construction. Whether Megafactory 1 can actually ramp to 1 GWh by 2030 will depend on battery supply, market demand, and the continued flow of capital into circular energy infrastructure. The facility is operational. The product is certified. The customer pipeline includes some of the highest-stakes power users in the economy.
What happens next will determine whether Moment's speed was vision or impatience.
