On 1 October, Valo took over Wärtsilä’s global energy storage business, and with it the group’s storage technology, roughly 480 staff and customers across Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas. The business has its roots in Wärtsilä’s 2017 acquisition of US software specialist Greensmith.
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The deal brings almost three years of deliberation at Wärtsilä to a close. The group began a strategic review of the business in October 2023, which concluded in March 2025 with storage kept on as a separate reporting segment with its own financial targets. Storage was still the group’s smallest segment, with sales of €694 million in 2025, about a tenth of the group total, and a profit margin of 3.3 percent against 12.1 percent for Wärtsilä’s other businesses. Wärtsilä expects Valo to lose money in 2026 before turning positive towards the end of 2027.
The RCT side of the deal
RCT Solutions, founded in 2012 and based in Konstanz, already knows Wärtsilä’s storage business well. It has led the engineering and set-up of a number of battery and solar factories worldwide, and one of its group companies has been a key supplier to Wärtsilä Energy Storage for several years. RCT also brings supply-chain know-how and an existing initiative to build integrated BESS manufacturing in the United States, which could give Valo a route towards vertical integration. Its solar PV engineering business will continue to operate independently.
Existing customers should notice little disruption. According to Valo, the technologies and teams they know will stay in place, backed by additional capacity in engineering, supply-chain management and manufacturing, and projects already under way remain covered by guarantees issued by Wärtsilä.
One supplier, one point of responsibility
Valo aims to take responsibility for the whole system, with hardware, software, engineering and long-term service under one roof. “Customers shouldn’t have to coordinate a host of different technologies and suppliers and simply trust that everything will work together as planned,” said Luke Witmer, Valo’s chief technology officer.
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“Valo has the experience, the technology and the people to deliver reliable performance at scale from day one. But our ambition goes further. We want to set new standards for how energy storage systems are developed, delivered and supported throughout their lifecycle,” said Peter Fath, Valo’s CEO and previously chief executive of RCT Solutions. (TF)
