The project-finance desk for building-scale batteries.

What KEEL does

Every building-scale battery has two halves. One is physical: the equipment, the electrical work, the permits and the commissioning, which a licensed contractor does. The other is financial and administrative: reading the tariff, modeling the demand charge, confirming the NYSERDA block and the federal credit against the program documents, deciding who should own the system, papering a lease, enrolling in demand response, and running the system's affairs for a decade. KEEL is the second half.

That split is deliberate. Contractors keep the customer and the work. Property owners get one fixed monthly payment and one phone number. Projects are funded by institutional equipment-finance partners, and the funding partner signs the lease directly with the property, so no project waits on KEEL's balance sheet.

How KEEL is different

• Ownership is a pricing decision, not a default. KEEL prices a capital lease and an operating lease from the same bills and places the tax credit where it is worth the most, which for most owners means they keep it.
• Every incentive is verified against the source. State program rates are read from the live dashboards, eligibility from the program manuals, federal terms from the statute. Each line in a proposal cites where it came from.
• No savings guarantee, and no pretending. Warranties cover equipment and installation. The savings model is built from interval data and shown to the owner in full, with an optional insurance policy for owners who want a backstop.
• Built for demand-charge bills. The model starts from the local tariff and the building's interval data, and carries the state and utility layers where they exist. New York, with the most complex layer in the country, is where the model was proven.

Who runs it

KEEL was founded in 2025 by two people who have spent their careers on opposite ends of the same problem: getting energy projects financed and built inside commercial real estate. Between them they have structured, financed, operated and sold more than a decade and a half of efficiency, solar and storage projects, and the platform behind every KEEL proposal is the product of that experience.

Josh Heald

Josh co-founded Pemco in 2011 and leads Pemco Capital, a commercial real estate energy-finance firm that has spent fifteen years funding efficiency and clean-energy projects in buildings through off-balance-sheet structures, local contractor networks and institutional investors. At KEEL he leads capital and the funding-partner relationships: the institutional equipment-finance partners that fund each project and sign the lease with the property. His background is why a KEEL lease looks the way it does, built to clear a lender's credit box on day one rather than reverse-engineered from a solar pitch.

Wes Cronk

Wes is KEEL's Operating Partner and a partner at The Fortify Companies, a clean-energy development and financial advisory firm. Over fifteen years in energy advisory, program design and operations, including senior roles at an energy-efficiency engineering firm and as chief operating officer at Pemco Capital, he has built the systems that take a project from a utility bill to a signed agreement. He designed and built KEEL's pricing and structuring platform, which prices every project from its own interval data and tariff, verifies each incentive against the program documents, and produces the proposal, the credit package and the funding request from one model. He holds a master's degree in sustainable development and environmental policy from New York University.

Neither of them installs batteries. That is the point: a licensed local contractor builds and services the system, an institutional funding partner funds it, and KEEL does the part in between, for the life of the agreement.

Where KEEL works

Across the United States, through licensed contractor partners in each market. Projects pencil best in utility territories with high demand charges or strong state storage programs: the Northeast, California, Georgia, Illinois and the mid-Atlantic among them. New York, where KEEL's program experience is deepest, has its own incentive guide and service area pages. Send a bill from anywhere and KEEL will say quickly whether the project pencils.