According to Zhang, the startup’s product can be charged and discharged 30,000 times without interruption for 30 years. It is fire-resistant, can be used at minus 40 to 50 degrees Celsius, and is 90 percent recyclable.
According to the International Energy Agency, global energy storage investment was estimated to exceed US$35 billion last year, up from US$20 billion in 2022, with most of it being installed on the power grid.
The two main applications for bulk energy storage today are electric vehicle batteries and utility-scale systems. The latter is EnerVenue’s focus, used in the power grid to manage intermittent renewable power production and serve as a backup power source for industrial, commercial, and residential buildings.
The nickel-metal hydride system being developed by EnerVenue will compete with other grid storage technologies, including lithium-ion, sodium-sulfur, flow batteries, and hydropumps that store energy by pumping water from one reservoir to another at a higher elevation. Masu.
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A year ago, EnerVenue announced it would build its first 1GWh factory in the U.S. on a 73-acre site in Kentucky (equivalent to 55 football fields) to house design, manufacturing and testing facilities.
A subsequent expansion phase could see the company’s output capacity increase to more than 20 GWh per year, with a total investment cost of over USD 1 billion, supported by generous local government tax incentives. At the time, EnerVenue had customer commitments exceeding 7GWh, the company said.
In late 2021, EnerVenue, co-founded by Stanford University materials science and engineering professor Cui Yi and Lee’s Full Vision, closed on US$125 million in Series A funding.
The funding round was led by Texas oilfield services company Schlumberger and attracted investment from oil giant Saudi Aramco, Beijing-based investment firm IDG Capital, and FullVision, and will support battery research, marketing and production scale in China and the United States. Funded the expansion. .
“In 2018, we sat down with Professor Choi from Stanford University to discuss the next generation of batteries,” said Chan. “He said we had a solution, and he and my team put together a piece of paper with the intellectual property involved and the future direction of the company, and we were just five people and he founded EnerVenue. did.”
