Forget Musk! This news from EnerVenue will change the world

How come the news of EnerVenues building a 1 million square foot Gigafactory in Kentucky isn’t topping all the news shows in the country? In my opinion, it should be.

EnerVenue did the announcement regarding the installation of Kentucky at the end of March, revealing that it will be capable of producing up to 1.5 gigawatt hours of energy storage capacity per year (enough to power over a million homes). According to CEO Jorg Heinemann, this big step is only the first in a long series; Over the next few years, EnerVenue plans to build additional factories in North America, totaling approximately 20 gigawatt hours per year of manufacturing capacity.

The company literally cannot create additional capacity fast enough. Heinemann told me that EnerVenue sits about 7.0 gigawatt hours behind. In other words, more than four and a half years of production at the new Kentucky facility was pronounced as soon as the groundbreaking ceremonies ribbon was cut. And customers try to move up the queue by paying a premium for their orders.

Read that last sentence again and you’ll understand why I’m so optimistic about the future of EnerVenues.

For those of you unfamiliar with EnerVenue, take a look at the article I wrote a few years ago for this column titled EnerVenue: The Batteries We Need For Storage At network-wide and my December 2021 story on EnerVenue closing a heavy oversubscribed Series A fundraiser led by SLB (NYSE: SLB, formerly Schlumberger) and Saudi Aramco.

From where I sit, EnerVenues’ innovative metal-hydrogen batteries, adapted from technology that has been proven in space satellite applications for years, have the potential to reshape energy storage applications at network-wide and industrial all over the world. It is not difficult for me to imagine EnerVenues energy storage vessels becoming the standard battery technology for all fixed installations.

EnerVenues batteries are durable, efficient and recyclable; they are also safer and much less capricious than lithium-ion, and they allow flexibility in charging speed. Batteries using similar nickel-hydrogen chemistry have completed millions of cell-hours of charge/discharge cycles in orbital spacecraft, so EnerVenue feels comfortable offering buyers a 20-year/20-year warranty. 000 cycles.

These are the benefits that EnerVenue talks about in its press releases, but I believe there are a few other benefits that cannot and should not be overlooked.

First, the materials used in batteries are readily available on all continents, reducing the fragility and carbon footprint of the supply chain and enabling the localization of production. I was appalled when I recently read a lithium-ion battery supply chain book titled Cobalt Red, which highlights the systematic exploitation of workers, many of whom are children, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Let’s put it this way: if you’re using a product that runs on a lithium-ion battery, you’re almost certainly the beneficiary of child slavery.

The fact that EnerVenue batteries do not require the use of rare or raw materials that are geographically concentrated in jurisdictions run by corrupt strongmen is a huge plus in my opinion.

Second, the form factor of EnerVenue batteries is large and their construction does not require delicate micro-engineering. In fact, Heinemann tells me that a human with a simple mechanical build can build an EnerVenue battery that meets operational specifications. This means that EnerVenue installations do not need to be configured with sophisticated, custom robotics. EnerVenue can use off-the-shelf production equipment and can train workers to build and inspect units easily. This simplification significantly reduces the capital costs of EnerVenues installations compared to those of a lithium-ion installation and, I believe, should also reduce operating costs.

The economic and technical advantages of EnerVenues technology are obvious; so obvious that smart money has already bet big on this Fremont, Calif., startup spun out of a lab at Stanford University. One of the five pillars of SLB’s New Energy business unit is energy storage, and the EnerVenues storage solution is the cornerstone upon which SLB’s stationary battery installation offering is built.

I’m dying to have an attic full of EnerVenues batteries myself, but alas, Heinemann tells me he’s currently focused on grid and industrial customers. Even though I can’t have cool orange energy storage tanks in my own attic, I’m hoping my local utility will take a page from Dr. Lorenzo Kristov’s Distributed Network Model and lay out a base layer of community storage to make my community more resilient and self-sufficient.

Heinemann and Kristov know, as I know, that if we are to have any chance of sustaining the progress of human civilizations and maintaining the viability of our biosphere, we must radically rethink how we use and distribute power.

Smart investors take note.