Clean Tech Manufacturing Hub Opens in Kensington

ReVolt Energy Solutions closed a $4 million Series A round last month, and the company hasn't moved to Austin or Brooklyn to spend it. Marcus Webb, the 34-year-old founder and chief executive, signed a 15-year lease on a 38,000-square-foot former textile facility on Lehigh Avenue in Kensington and is already pulling permits to retrofit the space into a battery-storage assembly and R&D campus. Construction starts August 11.

The timing is deliberate. Global instability — energy disruptions hammering wartime Russia, extreme heat killing thousands across Europe this summer — has pushed American municipal governments to fast-track resilience spending. Philadelphia's Office of Sustainability approved its updated GridReady Initiative in March, earmarking $22 million in federal pass-through funds for local clean-energy projects through 2028. ReVolt is among six firms that qualified for preferential city procurement under that program, which means Webb has a guaranteed pipeline before he ships a single unit to the private market.

From West Oak Lane Kitchen Table to Kensington Factory Floor

Webb grew up in West Oak Lane and did his undergraduate engineering work at Drexel University on Market Street before spending four years at a grid-storage startup in Newark. He came back to Philadelphia in 2022 with a prototype modular battery pack designed for mid-size commercial buildings — the kind that line Germantown Avenue and Frankford Avenue — that could store solar energy cheaply enough to undercut utility peak-rate charges by roughly 30 percent. He ran the early assembly work out of a rented bay at NextFab, the maker space on Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia, before the Series A made a proper factory feasible.

The Lehigh Avenue location wasn't accidental. Kensington has roughly 1.2 million square feet of vacant or underutilized industrial space, according to a 2025 report by the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation. Rents there run between $7 and $10 per square foot annually, compared with $18 to $24 per square foot in Navy Yard, where many of the city's better-known clean-tech tenants cluster. Webb's lease comes out to $8.50 per square foot — a cost structure that lets him price his 40-kilowatt-hour commercial units at $28,500, about 12 percent below comparable systems his three nearest competitors sell nationally.

Hiring Local, Betting on Workforce Pipeline

ReVolt plans to hire 47 full-time workers by the end of 2027, with starting wages set at $22 per hour for assembly technicians — above the city's $15.37 minimum wage and above the $19.50 average for comparable light-manufacturing roles tracked by the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corporation. Webb has already signed a training partnership with Community College of Philadelphia's Advanced Manufacturing program at the school's 1700 Spring Garden Street campus, which will funnel certificate graduates directly into ReVolt's hiring pool starting in January.

The investor syndicate behind the Series A includes Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, which contributed $1.1 million, and two climate-focused family offices based in Center City. Ben Franklin, which has backed more than 1,800 companies since its founding in 1982, has been pushing harder into hardware deals after years of weighting its portfolio toward software. ReVolt is the organization's largest single clean-energy hardware bet in the current fiscal year.

Philadelphia's broader economic picture gives Webb room for optimism but not complacency. The city's manufacturing sector shed roughly 2,400 jobs in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and overall commercial vacancy in Kensington remains stubbornly high. Several previous attempts to redevelop industrial corridors in that neighborhood stalled when anchor tenants couldn't secure reliable workforce pipelines or affordable utilities.

Webb is addressing the utility problem directly: ReVolt has applied to PECO for a commercial net-metering agreement that would let the Lehigh Avenue facility run largely on rooftop solar during peak summer hours. A decision from the utility is expected by September. If approved, the arrangement would cut the facility's operating energy costs by an estimated $140,000 annually — savings Webb says he intends to pass along to workers through a profit-sharing plan the company will formalize before the factory opens. The next 90 days will tell whether the permits, the PECO deal, and the hiring pipeline all land on schedule.