When Vince Canino started his new job in 2024, he arrived at the Van Nuys-based Capstone Green Energy under less- than-favorable conditions.
The legacy microturbine company, which managed to outlast many of its competitors in its 38 years of business, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy three months prior.
Canino, armed with decades of energy experience at the likes of General Electric Co., Smardt Chiller Group Inc. and ESS Tech Inc., was tasked with bringing the company back from the brink. Under his leadership, Capstone received an influx of $112.5 million in strategic investment in March and rebranded in June.
Under its new name, Capstone Energy+, the Van Nuys company is pitching itself to data centers, ports and other power-hungry customers as a full-service provider that will sell, rent or even run their energy systems.
“We recognize that it’s not going to capture a whole new market and capture a whole new customer base,” Canino says. “But we just wanted to refresh from where we were, shed the ills of the past and the Chapter 11.”
As the energy sector sees new innovations and funds from the public and private sector alike, microturbine manufacturers have only dwindled. But Capstone, which started in 1988 as Capstone Turbine Corp., has spent the last several decades weathering whatever hype cycle gripped the energy sector in that moment – from failed bets in electric vehicles to a fixation on going green to today’s insatiable power demands of electrification and data centers.
Over the years, the company has morphed to keep itself relevant in a changing energy landscape. Now, Capstone goes by Capstone Energy+ Inc., and the company is mobilizing to meet the energy demands of today’s power-hungry customers. As demand for power in the U.S. only grows, perhaps third time’s the charm for a legacy company surviving in an ever-evolving energy landscape.
“There are all sorts of different ways to provide solutions to the problems you’re trying to solve. Microturbines can solve a lot of those problems, but they can’t solve all of them,” Canino says. “Now we’re starting to think, okay, how can we create a suite of solution sets that can solve more problems the best way possible? That’s where the plus comes in.”
Staying in Vogue
For nearly four decades, Capstone has seen energy trends shift as dizzyingly swift as fast-fashion brands. The company started when the automotive industry turned to microturbines as a range ex- tender for lead-acid battery-run electric vehicles. At the time, some of the biggest names in industrials were trying to develop microturbines – GE, Honeywell International Inc., Toyota Motor Corp. and Ingersoll Rand Inc., to name a few.
One by one, companies pivoted away from microturbine innovations as the technology lost its luster. Despite entering into a five-year agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000 to develop microturbines, Honeywell sold the relevant intellectual property and ceased its operations in 2001, according to the Office of Scientific and Technical Information documents.
When Canino worked at Ingersoll Rand, he recommended the company shut down its microturbine operations.
Ingersoll Rand did just that in 2011.
“Back then, they looked at microturbines and said the big market was going to be mobility. That wasn’t panning out,” Canino says. “They were thinking they’re going to sell thousands and thousands of these and put them into cars, buses and trucks. When that didn’t pan out, I think a lot of the big folks decided this was really a niche market in combined heat and power, commercial and industrial. So, they kind of walked away.”
The 30-kilowatt engines Capstone and others were making were indeed quite niche. But as larger companies fell off the microturbine bandwagon, Capstone pressed on. Instead of walking away, the company moved on from vehicles and began developing larger offerings like a 65-kilowatt and 200-kilowatt gas turbine platforms, which began to gain traction with customers.
Today, there are only 55 microturbine-related companies in the world, according to PitchBook, with Capstone deemed the market leader. The company is the only publicly traded commercial business of its kind and has raised nearly four times as much as the second-most funded venture.
“We’re in a unique spot in that we can still be one of the few players, but be very, very experienced,” Canino says.
To that end, Capstone relisted on the Nasdaq in July following its turnaround from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and restructuring in late 2023 which saw it downgrade to an over-the-counter trading market.
The go-green hype
Another energy trend to take hold among the private markets was “going green.” Fueled by carbon emission reg- ulations and federal tax incentives, private equity and venture capital began investing in alternative power sources like solar and wind. Venture funding in climate tech peaked in 2021, according to PitchBook.
Capstone hopped on that trend in 2021, changing its name to Capstone Green Energy Corp. and touting a new mission of carbon reduction and green energy manufacturing. On Earth Day that year, then-chief executive Darren Jamison said the company saved its customers $217 million in annual green energy costs.
“Capstone Green Energy will help customers build and maintain smart energy infrastructure and engage with them as a long-term service provider and partner for their critical car- bon-saving initiatives,” Jamison said in a statement.
Capstone Green Energy branded itself as the go-green company that stamped its power containers with green lettering and a logo emblematic of a leaf. But by the time Canino was considering the chief executive role, the branding seemed out of touch to him.
“I didn’t know it was Capstone Green Energy. I was like, well, that’s odd. How is a microturbine company green?” Canino says. “I understand the strategy back then; they were trying to integrate solar and batteries and all of those things to shift the focus. But that didn’t happen.”
Today’s energy craze
It appears 2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for the energy sector as a whole. Driven by artificial intelligence, climate change events, the electrification of commodities and domestic manufacturing, the industry has raised a record $772 billion in capital as of Sept. 16, according to PitchBook. As more of American’s daily lives become energy dependent, the grid is becoming less reliable for hospitals, assisted living homes, data centers and businesses. Investors are pumping funds into renewables as the key to securing national energy independence, per PitchBook analyst John MacDonagh.
“Regions without accessible domestic fossil fuel resources face significant exposure to supply chain disruption and price shocks in global energy markets.
Clean energy generation offers a degree of insulation from these pressures that conventional sources do not,” MacDonagh, a clean energy research analyst at PitchBook, wrote in an analyst note.
“The conflict in Ukraine brought this consideration into focus for European governments and investors, and it has remained a factor shaping policy and capital allocation across much of the continent,” he said in his note. “More recent geopolitical developments in the Middle East have reinforced the importance of energy independence.”
Capstone is rising to meet that demand. The company is building a slew of energy systems to meet the diverse needs of its growing customer base, some of whom are navigating the energy space for the first time. Capstone offers energy-as-a-service rentals, lease-to-own programs and build-own-operate-maintain models whereby it acts as a steward of another company’s energy ecosystem.
“In energy, we have some customers that really just want to get to the nuts and bolts and they want to do it all,” Canino says. “And then there are customers that want something in between. And then, there are a lot of our data center customers that are saying to us, ‘Look, I just need to focus on the white space. I don’t know anything about power. I don’t want to know anything about power, I don’t want to buy the gas, I don’t want to do any of that. You do that for me.’”
While investment in almost every alternative energy vertical is up, per PitchBook, microturbines are lagging behind. The sector raised zero capital in 2024, and could end this year the same way.
Regardless, Capstone is leveraging its technology to cement microturbines in key industries.
Microturbines can run on a wide range of fuels, like off gas from oil and gas rigs or biogas from wastewater treatment plants. They’re also modular. Capstone’s low-emission, low-noise microturbines work well at ports, crowded environments that need to move equipment around and keep up with goals of reaching a net-zero greenhouse gas emission.
The company has also identified electric vehicle charging as a major growth market – Capstone’s microturbines act as a supplemental source of power to protect charging station transformers.
“I don’t think there’s one magic bullet or one secret sauce to the energy equation. I think it does depend on the size of energy,” Canino says. “Energy diversity, I think, is really the right answer. Especially if you look at some of the wars that have gone on lately and how they target power plants, distributed generation is going to become more real.”