EnerVenue recently announced that the world’s first large-scale production line dedicated to aqueous metal batteries has officially begun production at its mass-production base in Wujin District, Changzhou, marking its transition from pilot validation to large-scale manufacturing.
The first-phase line has a designed annual capacity of 250 MWh and is expected to reach full capacity in November, when it will produce about 300 fourth-generation aqueous metal cells per day. Under the plan, the base’s capacity will rise to 1 GWh in 2027.
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in California, EnerVenue was founded by Yi Cui, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, who has long researched batteries, nanomaterials and energy storage.
The company focuses on commercializing nickel-hydrogen batteries. Its technology traces back to batteries used in the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. It is the world’s first company to commercialize NASA space-grade nickel-hydrogen battery technology for grid-scale energy storage. Its products cover long-duration energy storage applications for utilities, independent power producers and industrial users, with customers including RWE, Towngas, Avid Group and Duke Energy.
Aqueous metal batteries such as nickel-hydrogen batteries offer high cycle life and high safety. EnerVenue’s fourth-generation aqueous metal battery can achieve 30,000 cycles and has a design life of up to 30 years. Because of their high cost, the company’s nickel-hydrogen chemistry was long confined to a single niche: satellites in Earth orbit.
That changed after founder Yi Cui discovered a technology that can replace the platinum used in space satellite batteries with metal alloys, expanding nickel-hydrogen batteries into the energy storage sector.
In March 2023, EnerVenue announced plans to open a 1-million-square-foot gigafactory in Shelby County, Kentucky, and reached long-term material and equipment supply agreements with U.S.-based suppliers Precision Process and Precious Plate.
Located in the heart of Kentucky’s manufacturing region on 73 acres, the plant was to have 1 GWh of annual capacity in its first phase and was expected to begin production by the end of that year.
However, the plan was ultimately not implemented.
“It was a valuable learning experience,” CEO Henning Rath said in an interview with Reuters, noting that the technology was not yet mature at the time and the company’s funding was insufficient to support a long-cycle, high-cost trial-and-error process.
In October 2023, EnerVenue’s wholly owned Chinese subsidiary, EnerVenue Energy Technology (Jiangsu) Co., Ltd., was officially established, and the EnerVenue innovative energy storage project was signed and broke ground the same month. The following year, EnerVenue’s new nickel-hydrogen battery anode material project, with a total investment of $300 million, officially settled in the Wujin National High-Tech Industrial Development Zone.
The project will build an R&D and manufacturing base for core anode materials for new nickel-hydrogen batteries. Once fully operational, it will have 15 GWh of nickel-hydrogen battery anode material capacity.
From materials to batteries, the U.S. battery upstart has built an industrial system in Changzhou covering raw materials and manufacturing.
Asked why it chose Changzhou, Henning Rath said candidly that the site selection was mainly based on engineering talent and the supply chain. Without China’s existing manufacturing system, it would be difficult for the company, with its current funding, to commercialize this production process.
“China is the factory of factories,” he said. Changzhou’s dense cluster of hydraulics, pneumatics and automation companies, as well as engineers able to quickly improve designs, were key reasons the new production line could be implemented.
Thanks to its strong industrial chain and manufacturing capabilities, EnerVenue’s Changzhou plant cost only between $20 million and $50 million, a sharp reduction from the planned investment in the Kentucky plant.
Source: WeChat Official Account——电池工业网
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