Customer Story
Efficiently delivering underground energy storage projects
Hydrostor adopted Procore to help bring consistency, transparency and collaboration to its utility-scale builds
The Challenge
Hydrostor builds massive underground energy storage facilities designed to provide reliability and resiliency to power grids. And with such a critical mission, expanding globally required standardized processes. Information was scattered across emails and shared drives, making it difficult to track regulatory requirements and coordinate with partners. To grow its pipeline and work towards groundbreaking on its flagship projects, the company needed structure, consistency and a single source of truth.
The Solution
Hydrostor started by establishing a formal Project Management Office (PMO), then selected Procore as a centralized platform to bring structure to its growth. Using Procore’s Project Management and Financial Management tools — including Action Plans, RFIs, Submittals, Meeting Minutes, Bidding and Analytics — the company created a single source of truth for global teams. Workflows became standardized, procurement became more transparent, and leadership gained real-time visibility into complex, high-stakes projects.
The Results
- Standardized workflows across teams in 3 continents
- Developing leadership-ready dashboards for monthly steering reviews
- Tracked 150+ regulatory conditions within a centralized system
- Helped to streamline EPCM bid evaluations with digital bid leveling
- Helped enable lean teams to manage late-stage utility-scale projects
“We evaluated several project management information systems and found Procore to be the best solution to get our teams aligned globally. Since we operate in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK, we needed a global platform to ensure consistency across our different project teams.”
Darnell Everett
Vice President of Project Execution
Hydrostor
Building energy storage beneath the surface
Founded in 2010, Hydrostor specializes in Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) projects, facilities that store excess energy by compressing air into underground caverns and releasing it when the grid needs power. It’s important work that involves a unique blend of heavy civil construction, advanced mechanical systems and complex regulatory oversight.
By the time Darnell Everett joined as Vice President of Project Execution in mid-2024, the company had two late-stage development projects underway in North America and Australia. At this time, establishing a standardized execution framework was critical for the organization.
For projects involving underground caverns and long transmission lines — where a single missed condition could delay construction — structure was going to be key.
Creating one source of truth
Everett was the driving force behind the formation of the PMO, bringing together engineering, development, quality and project management leaders to define standards. The next step was to implement Procore as its global platform.
“Because we operate in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, we needed a global platform to ensure consistency across our different project teams,” said Everett. “Of all the platforms we looked at, Procore emerged as the clear choice to achieve that.”
Having that single source of truth quickly moved the needle on company-wide collaboration. “What stood out to us about Procore was the ability to bring everything into one environment,” Everett said. “Meeting minutes, RFIs, submittals, correspondence — instead of floating around in email chains or spreadsheets, they’re tracked, assigned and closed out in one system. You can see who owns it, when it’s due and what the status is. That accountability was immediate.”
One of the earliest “aha” moments came from structured meeting minutes. “On these large-scale projects, you have multiple stakeholders, multiple contractors, multiple vendors,” he said. “Being able to generate meeting minutes, distribute them through the system, assign tasks with deadlines and track them — that was instantaneous. We saw that efficiency right away across both of our late-stage projects.”
RFIs and submittals followed the same pattern. “The collaboration has improved tremendously,” Everett said. “Everything has a workflow. You’re approving, rejecting, commenting — and it’s all happening in one place. You’re not blasting emails to distribution lists hoping someone responds.”
Managing complexity without adding overhead
One Hydrostor project alone required compliance with more than 150 regulatory conditions before construction could begin. Each carried submission deadlines tied to specific scopes of work.
“We needed a mechanism to visualize and share that information,” Everett said. “Tracking 150+ conditions and requirements — some due 90 days in advance, some 60, some 30 — without a system would have been extremely difficult. Action Plans came in very handy for us.”
Procurement posed another challenge. Hydrostor’s delivery strategy includes multiple partners, contractors, and vendors, so evaluating proposals efficiently was critical was a critical activity for the projects.
“The bidding tool was paramount,” Everett said. “We could issue RFPs, receive the proposals in one location and use the bid leveling tool to compare them side by side. A lot of the legwork was already done for us. It allowed us to form recommendations for leadership with confidence, knowing we had organized and transparent information.”
That transparency became particularly useful to executive leadership. Using Procore Analytics, the teams are beginning to develop dashboards for monthly steering meetings. “You can provide a high-level view without getting buried in the details,” Everett said. “All the information that’s inputted can be sourced into dashboards with graphs and charts. Leadership appreciates having that awareness for decision-making.”
Laying the foundation for long-term growth
The company’s two flagship projects are nearing construction, but Hydrostor sees Procore as foundational to how it will scale globally. As new teams come on board and additional projects move from development into execution, the system provides a consistent starting point.
“As we continue to grow the organization and increase our pipeline, Procore gives us a platform to execute,” Everett said. “We’re still early in fully utilizing everything it can do. But even now, it’s allowing us to deliver these large, complex infrastructure projects.”
He credits not just the software, but the partnership behind it. “Customer service has been supportive. There’s constant engagement. If we have questions, there’s someone on the other side helping us work toward a solution,” he said. For a company building 50-year storage assets underground, that reliability matters.
“This is just the starting point,” Everett said. “There’s a lot riding on us being successful with these projects. And I want to see us utilize Procore to its fullest capabilities — because when you’re managing something this complex, having that structure and that collaboration in place makes all the difference.”
