EnerVenue Backs Its Nickel Hydrogen Batteries With 20-Year/200,000-Cycle Warranty

EnerVenue is a battery company most people have never heard of outside of the aerospace industry. It makes nickel hydrogen batteries that have proven themselves in orbital spacecraft by providing reliable electricity for more than 200 million cell-hours and more than 100,000 charge and discharge cycles.

Now the company wants to bring its technology to the energy storage business on Earth. To get the attention of potential customers, it is offering Capacity Assurance, which it calls the simplest warranty in the business — 20 years and 200,000 charge/discharge cycles with no more than 12% degradation.

“For years, the stationary storage market has been asking for a simple, long term capacity guarantee,” says Randy Selesky, chief revenue officer for EnerVenue. “Capacity Assurance delivers an industry-best promise that complements EnerVenue’s robust technology and provides our partners with both operational confidence and contractual security.”

With Capacity Assurance, EnerVenue customers can control risk and protect their investments. This straightforward extended warranty covers a project while it’s in its most critical payback phase and is offered with no hidden exclusions and simple operating terms. With assurance of 88% capacity over 20 years, Capacity Assurance terms are designed to align with customers’ needs by supporting the long-term life cycles of typical energy storage projects.

EnerVenue’s nickel hydrogen battery enables energy providers and system owners with proven grid scale renewable storage technology that rectifies the cost, durability, and safety limitations of lithium-ion batteries. Those conventional batteries suffer from significant and problematic battery degradation. Their power output falls several percent every year, which requires energy providers to perform expensive mitigation by adding new battery banks to their existing footprints to keep up with their contractual power output obligations. Lithium-ion warranties reflect this risk with their cost and complexity. They usually require operation in a very narrow specifications window and containing myriad exclusions and exceptions.

In direct contrast, EnerVenue’s battery systems offer a 30+ year design life with very low year to year degradation. With no augmentations required, EnerVenue’s batteries are ultra-low maintenance, with similarly low material and operational costs. EnerVenue batteries also have no no fire or thermal runaway risk, exhibit extremely minimal degradation and, and are built to operate in a wide range of ambient temperatures (-40º C to +60º C), which reduces the need for auxiliary heating and cooling. They also are non-toxic and fully recyclable.

EnerVenue Is Signing Up Customers

EnerVenue has recently leased a 64,000 square foot commercial building in Fremont, California, where it will construct a pilot production line. It has 4 times the square footage of the company’s  existing headquarters, also in Fremont. That extra space will provide it with the space it needs to scale up production and hire additional staff with sales, service, and engineering expertise. It also has space to accommodate a larger research and development program and a bigger manufacturing area.

In June, it agreed to supply 40 MWh of its EnerStation battery systems to Puerto Rico’s Sonnell Energy Solutions in 2023, with an additional 420 MWh coming in 2024 and 2025. Last month, the company entered into an agreement with Green Energy Renewable Solutions, a Houston-based business that specializes in building onshore and offshore renewable energy installations. EnerVenue will supply 50 MWh of its nickel hydrogen batteries in 2023, 100 MWh in 2024, and 100 MWh in 2025.

“EnerVenue’s energy storage technology will be a critical asset to Green Energy Renewable Solutions, ” said CEO Henrik Jensen. “EnerVenue’s technology features exceptional longevity and durability with minimal maintenance required, and its fire-safe properties are especially critical in our expected applications. EnerVenue’s transformational technology will help Green Energy Renewable Solutions provide superior value to our global customer base.”

Initial projects are expected to be onshore, but to support the company’s long term goals, Green Energy’s energy storage solutions must meet particularly strict DNV and CE certification mandates for systems deployed in the offshore and maritime market. Nickel hydrogen batteries from EnerVenue provide exceptionally long battery life with low maintenance requirements and zero fire propagation risk — an especially crucial safety and compliance factor in offshore locations such as oil rigs.

In May, EnerVenue and Pine Gate Renewables announced a multi-year agreement to deploy 2400 MWh of nickel hydrogen energy storage systems in the United States. Pine Gate Renewables currently manages more than one gigawatt in operational renewable assets, with more than 16 GW in active development across the country. The agreement allows Pine Gate to leverage EnerVenue’s uniquely robust, safe, cost efficient energy storage technology capable of delivering multiple power cycles each day.

“EnerVenue batteries offer a differentiated value proposition — lower degradation across a wide temperature band, and lower cost for maintenance and augmentation, whilst posing no fire or thermal runaway risk. These batteries also have a stackable form factor and can last for more than 30 years while being able to cycle multiple times a day,”said Raafe Khan, Director of Energy Storage at Pine Gate Renewables.

The Takeaway

EnerVenue hasn’t released many technical details about its nickel hydrogen battery. We can’t tell you what its energy density is, how many hours it can supply energy back to the grid, or how much it costs. The company says only that, once in operation, the cost of electricity it supplies is about a penny per kWh and that acquisition costs are somewhat lower than a traditional lithium-ion storage battery.

The one thing that suggests this technology may be the real deal is that a lot of people who do know the specifics have committed to spending millions of dollars to acquire these batteries. We are left to take it on faith that they wouldn’t do that if the data didn’t support their investments.

For a while, lithium-ion batteries were the only game in town when it came to grid scale energy storage. But nothing ever stands still in the world of technology. ESS and Energy Dome are promising 10 hours of storage at competitive prices while Form Energy says its iron and salt batteries can supply electricity for up to 100 hours.

The ground is continually shifting in the grid scale storage industry. Perhaps there is more than enough room for nickel hydrogen batteries from EnerVenue as part of the mix of available energy storage products.

 

Appreciate CleanTechnica’s originality and cleantech news coverage? Consider becoming a CleanTechnica Member, Supporter, Technician, or Ambassador — or a patron on Patreon.

 

---

Don’t want to miss a cleantech story? Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

 

---

Have a tip for CleanTechnica, want to advertise, or want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

---

Advertisement

 

---

Source: Clean Technica