On Wednesday, energy startup Arbor Energy said it sold 5 gigawatts worth of modular turbines to GridMarket, a company that helps arrange power projects for data centers and industrial users.
“Everybody wants more power. They wanted it yesterday,” Brad Hartwig, co-founder and CEO Arbortold TechCrunch. “The time frames are getting compressed and the scale is getting bigger.”
Arbor’s Halcyon turbines are based on rocket turbomachines, a high-performance engine technology originally developed for spaceflight, and its first commercial turbines will be 3D printed and have a capacity of 25 megawatts each. GridMarket’s order represents 200 units if fully filled.
Neither company disclosed the exact price of the deal, though Hartwig said he sees Arbor “being willing to pay upwards of $100 per megawatt-hour.” A person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the total is in the single-digit billions of dollars.
The startup plans to connect its first turbine to the grid in 2028 and ramp up production by 2030, when it hopes to deliver more than 100 turbines annually. According to Hartwig, the goal is to produce enough for 10 gigawatts of new capacity each year.
Arbor’s first designs were for the Halcyon subsisting on a vegetarian diet — the power plant will receive organic material such as crop waste and wood chips from farms and timber operations, which will be converted into syngas – a combustible gas mixture – and burned in the presence of pure oxygen. The result will be pure CO2could be captured and kept underground.
In the process, each Halcyon turbine will generate carbon negative energy. The organic matter it consumes would otherwise decay, releasing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Arbor has since modified Halcyon receives natural gas in addition to biomass—making it actually more of a eater. Otherwise the process remains the same i.e. CO2 emerging can still be sequestered.
Because it uses natural gas, this configuration would not be carbon negative. In fact, as methane leaks from pipes and valves throughout the supply chain, Halcyon’s fossil-fueled turbines will still produce some greenhouse gas emissions, while also increasing sustainable demand for natural gas. Hartwig said the company works with low-leakage natural gas suppliers and that this is “an economic benefit of CO sequestration.”2.”
“We see a long-term path to less than 10 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour,” Hartwig said.2 per kilowatt hour.
Arbor has not abandoned its biomass-fired projects, and sales to GridMarket are not limited to one specific fuel. However, there are other announced agreements built around biomass is much smaller More than signed with GridMarket.
Like many energy startups, Arbor got a significant boost from the data center boom. Manufacturers of conventional gas turbines have been caught flat-footed and have been reluctant to increase production significantly in the past, given the volatility of such markets. Even if they wanted to, Hartwig said, they would have trouble ramping up production quickly.
“These supply chains are basically bottlenecked by the blades and blades for traditional turbines. They’re fairly inelastic supply chains, both in terms of how artisanal the manufacturing method is—directionally hardened, single-crystal turbine blades—and the highly specialized workforce behind it,” he said. “If you were to get in line to buy a turbine today, you’d be waiting until 2032.”
Arbor is betting that it will help get its machined and 3D-printed parts to market faster. “People want power in the next few years, and they want a lot of it,” Hartwig said.
