Allegro strikes deal to commercialize flow battery tech
Australia-based Allegro Energy has entered a strategic partnership with Jena Batteries, a subsidiary of China-based Suqian Time Energy Storage, to accelerate the commercial deployment of its flow battery technology.
Allegro Energy has developed a water-based redox flow battery (RFB) energy storage solution that it said is non-flammable and cheaper than competing technology. The technology is based on the company’s microemulsion electrolyte technology, which has overcome the voltage limitations that typically hinder water-based solutions, giving it an advantage in the large-scale, long-duration energy storage market.
Allegro Energy CEO Thomas Nann said the partnership with Jena, which develops and markets flow battery systems for industrial and utility applications, represents an important step in moving Allegro’s technology from Australian innovation to globally scalable manufacturing.
He said the challenge is no longer whether long-duration storage is needed, but how to manufacture and deploy it at the scale required by the energy transition. He added that Jena and its parent company provide access to an established large-scale flow battery manufacturing platform through which Allegro’s electrolyte technology can be incorporated into gigawatt-scale energy storage solutions.
“Allegro has spent years developing the chemistry. Jena Batteries brings significant manufacturing and system integration capability,” Nann said. “Combining those strengths gives us a pathway to take an Australian-developed technology and prove that it can be manufactured and deployed at commercial scale.”
Nann said the partnership also establishes a potential bridge between Australian/New Zealand intellectual property and international manufacturing scale without requiring Allegro to build that manufacturing capability entirely from scratch.
“The opportunity for Australia isn’t simply to deploy batteries invented and manufactured somewhere else,” he said. “We have the science and engineering capability to develop important new storage technologies here. Partnerships like this give Australian innovation a credible pathway into global manufacturing and global markets.”
The companies will now look to deploy pilot flow battery systems in Australia, providing a pathway to demonstrate the technology at increasing scale before exploring opportunities in international markets.
Australian energy major Origin, which has a 5% equity stake in Allegro, has already announced plans to pilot the technology with a 60 MWh redox flow battery to be developed at the site of its Eraring coal-fired power station on the New South Wales Central Coast.
The announcement of the partnership comes as electricity grids worldwide face a rapidly growing requirement for energy storage systems capable of shifting renewable energy over longer periods.
This demand has been hastened by the power needs of data centres with Allegro claiming its technology has been designed for multi-decade, high-cycle operation and is ideally suited to the load profile of data centres.
“While lithium-ion batteries have become an important part of the storage market, the load profile of data centres and increasing penetration of wind and solar is creating demand for technologies designed specifically for longer-duration applications,” the company said.
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