Vessels represent the future of stationary battery installations about the globe.EnerVenue.com

How is it that the news of EnerVenue’s constructing a 1 million-square foot Gigafactory in Kentucky not top each and every news broadcast in the nation? In my opinion, it must be.

EnerVenue CEO, Jorg Heinemann

EnerVenue.com

EnerVenue created the announcement about the Kentucky facility in late March, revealing it will be capable of making up to 1.five gigawatt-hours of power storage capacity per year (sufficient to energy much more than one particular million residences). According to CEO Jorg Heinemann, this significant step is just the initially of lots of more than the subsequent handful of years, EnerVenue plans to make other plants in North America, totaling about 20 gigawatt-hours per year of manufacturing capacity.

The enterprise can actually not make additional capacity rapidly sufficient. Heinemann confided to me that EnerVenue is sitting on 7. gigawatt-hours of backlog. In other words, more than 4 and a half years of the new Kentucky facility’s production was spoken for as quickly as the groundbreaking ceremony’s ribbon was reduce. And clients are attempting to move ahead in the backlog line by paying a premium for their orders.

Reread that final sentence and you can realize why I am so bullish on EnerVenue’s future.

For these of you for who are not familiar with EnerVenue, take a appear back at the report I wrote a handful of years ago for this column entitled EnerVenue: The Batteries We Need to have For Grid-Scale Storage and my December 2021 story about EnerVenue closing a heavily oversubscribed Series A fundraising round led by SLB (NYSE: SLB, formerly Schlumberger) and Saudi Aramco.

one particular of these beauties, but EnerVenue Storage Vessels are wonderful for stationary storage.EnerVenue.com

From exactly where I am sitting, EnerVenue’s revolutionary metal-hydrogen batteries—adapted from a technologies that has been established in space satellite applications for years—have the prospective to reshape grid-scale and industrial power storage applications worldwide. It is not tough for me to picture EnerVenue’s Power Storage Vessels becoming the typical battery technologies for all stationary installations.

EnerVenue’s batteries are tough, effective, and recyclable they are also safer and significantly significantly less finicky than lithium-ion, and they let for flexibility in charging speed. Batteries utilizing a comparable chemistry—nickel-hydrogen—have completed millions of cell-hours’ worth of charge/discharge cycles in orbital spacecraft, so EnerVenue feels comfy providing purchasers a 20-year / 20,000-cycle assure.

These are the positive aspects EnerVenue talks about in its press releases, but I think there are a handful of other rewards that can’t and must not be overlooked.

Initial, the components applied in the batteries are readily offered on each and every continent, decreasing the fragility and carbon footprint of the provide chain and permitting for localization of production. I was appalled when I lately study a book about the lithium-ion battery provide chain named Cobalt Red, which sheds light on the systematic of exploitation of workers—many of whom are children—in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Let’s place it this way: if you use any item operating on a lithium-ion battery, it is pretty much specific that you are the beneficiary of youngster slavery.

cassiterite mine of Lukushi on February 17, 2022 in Manono. – The Democratic Republic of Congo is wealthy with Lithium, an critical mineral for electric vehicle batteries, which nests in the remains of the former mining town of the city of Manono in the south-east of the nation in the province of Tanganyika. To get out of poverty, the inhabitants of Manono, most of whom are artisanal diggers, spot their hope in the investment of the Australian enterprise AVZ minerals which plans to invest 600 million dollars in the building of a lithium mining (Photo by Junior KANNAH / AFP) (Photo by JUNIOR KANNAH/AFP through Getty Photos)AFP through Getty Photos

The truth that EnerVenue batteries do not need the use of scarce or raw components that are geographically concentrated in jurisdictions run by corrupt strongmen is a big constructive in my view.

Second, the type aspect of the EnerVenue batteries is big and their building does not need delicate micro-engineering. In truth, Heinemann tells me that a human with a easy mechanical jig can make an EnerVenue battery that meets operational specifications. What this suggests is that EnerVenue facilities will need not be set up with fancy, custom-constructed robotics. EnerVenue can use off-the-shelf production gear and can train workers to make and inspect the units simply. This simplification cuts the capital charges of EnerVenue’s facilities substantially versus these of a lithium-ion facility and, I think, must reduce the operating charges as nicely.

The financial and technical positive aspects of EnerVenue’s technologies are apparent so apparent that the clever cash has currently placed a big bet on this Fremont, California commence-up that was born out of a Stanford University lab. 1 of the 5 pillars of SLB’s New Power organization unit is power storage, and EnerVenue’s storage answer is the cornerstone on which SLB is resting its stationary battery installation providing.

in the front row wearing a blue shirt. CTO Dr. Yi Cui is in the front row wearing a gray jacket.EnerVenue.com

I am dying to have an attic complete of EnerVenue’s batteries myself, but alas, Heinemann tells me that he is focused on grid and industrial clients suitable now. Even if I can not have some friendly, orange Power Storage Vessels in my personal attic, I am hoping that my nearby utility will take a web page out of Dr. Lorenzo Kristov’s distributed grid model and set up a base layer of neighborhood storage to make my neighborhood much more resilient and self-enough.

Heinemann and Kristov know, as I know, that if we are to have a possibility at sustaining human civilization’s advances and sustaining the viability of our biosphere, we ought to radically rethink the way we use and distribute energy.

Intelligent investors take note.

Comply with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here. 

Most of my experienced life has been spent as an equity analyst and as a consultant. Now I am leveraging my knowledge in the economic markets to assistance commence-up ventures fight climate modify and restore our ecosystem. Ahead of becoming a Forbes contributor, I worked as a hedge fund danger manager, an investment banker in Tokyo and New York, a Market place Strategist for Morningstar and as the Director of Analysis for a economic information commence-up in Chicago as nicely as publishing a nicely-reviewed book about selections (The Intelligent Alternative Investor, 2014, McGraw-Hill). My experience in valuing private and public businesses has been sought out by institutions such as the Planet Bank and Blackrock, and I have served as CFO and COO / CFO for quite a few ClimateTech commence-ups.

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