CHALLENGE
Torus, a South Salt Lake-based maker of modular power plants combining flywheel inertia with battery storage, was building a category defining U.S. energy company, yet remained largely unknown outside Utah. The company needed to translate a complex technical story, distributed utility infrastructure, hybrid storage, and domestic manufacturing, into mainstream relevance for utilities, hyperscalers, investors, and policymakers, all while competing for attention in a crowded clean energy news cycle.
OBJECTIVE
Pierpont Communications set three measurable goals for 2025: secure tier-one national earned media around every major Torus milestone, including the Rocky Mountain Power partnership and the $200 million Magnetar investment; establish CEO Nate Walkingshaw as a recognized national voice on grid resilience through contributed articles, interviews, and award recognition; and elevate Torus into top-tier innovation, energy, and leadership awards programs to validate its category leadership.
SOLUTION
Pierpont built and executed an integrated earned media and thought leadership program tailored to Torus’ growth narrative. The team activated relationships with a curated list of 15 priority outlets spanning national business press (Fortune, Axios, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times), energy trades (Utility Dive, POWER Magazine, Hart Energy, Energy Storage News, Canary Media, T&D World), and Utah regional press (KSL, Deseret News, Utah Business).
Around each Torus milestone, the Pierpont team developed press releases, technical briefs, exclusive pitches, and executive briefings, including the Rocky Mountain Power MOU for 70 MW of BESS and flywheel capacity, the Wattsmart Battery commercial approval, the First Colony Mortgage clean energy community, the Ultion Technologies Series A, and the $200 million Magnetar growth investment that brought a Magnetar Managing Director onto Torus’ board. Pierpont led the broader campaign strategy and CEO briefings that supported the Magnetar moment, helping Torus prepare for and amplify high impact business press conversations.
In parallel, Pierpont stood up a thought leadership engine for CEO Nate Walkingshaw, landing a contributed byline in T&D World on grid resilience as a monitoring and control challenge, and placing Nate as a named source in Utility Dive and POWER Magazine features on DERs, virtual power plants, and the data center power crunch.
To reinforce the narrative with third-party validation, Pierpont built and managed a robust awards and speaking calendar, authoring submissions across innovation, energy, leadership, and manufacturing categories, including Reuters Global Energy Awards, POWER Awards (Distributed Energy and Smart Grid), the R&D 100 Awards, the S&P Platts Global Energy Awards, PLMA Awards of Excellence, CNBC Disruptor 50, TIME100 Most Influential Companies, the TechCrunch Joseph C. Belden Innovation Award, BloombergNEF Pioneers, and the WSJ Future of Everything Festival.
RESULTS
In 2025, Pierpont elevated Torus from a regional Utah story to a nationally recognized leader in modular, distributed power infrastructure. The program delivered 53 live earned media placements across 36 unique outlets, generating more than 46 million in combined unique monthly visitor reach, with multiple placements in outlets exceeding 200,000 UMV including a Fortune newsletter hit, Axios, Utility Dive, POWER Magazine, Data Center Dynamics, KSL, Deseret News, and Yahoo News.
Pierpont landed every major Torus announcement in tier-one trades and broke the company into mainstream business press for the first time. Coverage of the Rocky Mountain Power partnership earned placements in POWER Magazine, Utility Dive, Energy Storage News, Data Center Dynamics, Microgrid Knowledge, and Hart Energy, while the Wattsmart Battery approval drove broadcast and consumer reach through KSL, KSL-TV, Deseret News, and Yahoo News. Hart Energy delivered repeat coverage across multiple Torus milestones, reinforcing its standing with energy industry decision makers. Around the $200 million Magnetar growth investment, Pierpont led the broader campaign and executive briefings and secured follow-on coverage in Fortune, Axios, POWER, Utility Dive, Renewables Now, Power Technology, and Saur Energy.
On the thought leadership side, Pierpont placed a Walkingshaw bylined feature in T&D World on grid resilience and the monitoring and control challenge facing modern utilities, and positioned Nate as a recurring expert source in trade and national reporting on DERs, virtual power plants, and AI-driven load growth. The awards program delivered recognition for Torus in the R&D 100 Awards and the S&P Platts Global Energy Awards, finalist or recognized status in the Reuters Global Energy Awards and the POWER Smart Grid Award, and built a submission pipeline across more than ten national programs including TIME100, CNBC Disruptor 50, PLMA, BloombergNEF Pioneers, and the WSJ Future of Everything Festival.
Pierpont’s earned media and thought leadership program gave Torus the national platform it needed to support a $200 million capital raise, expand utility and C&I partnerships across six Western states, and scale toward its GigaOne manufacturing campus, all while cementing Nate Walkingshaw’s reputation as one of the defining voices of America’s modular, distributed energy future.
