Australian long-duration energy storage (LDES) developer Allegro Energy has entered a strategic partnership with Jena Batteries and its parent company Suqian Time Energy Technology.
The partnership is designed to move Allegro’s microemulsion flow battery (MeFB) technology toward commercial-scale manufacturing.
Allegro Energy is a Newcastle-based clean-technology company. It develops water-based flow battery systems built around a proprietary microemulsion electrolyte; a mixture CEO and co-founder Dr Thomas Nann has described as essentially water, oil and dishwashing liquid combined in specific ratios.
The chemistry is designed to avoid the cost, safety and performance limitations that have constrained other long-duration storage technologies. It uses non-flammable, commodity materials rather than scarce or expensive inputs.
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Jena Batteries and Suqian Time Energy Technology bring manufacturing scale and system integration experience in flow battery production. Allegro said this provides a platform to incorporate its electrolyte technology into gigawatt-scale energy storage systems.
Under the partnership, the companies plan to deploy pilot systems in Australia. These are intended to demonstrate the technology at an increasing scale before the companies explore international markets.
Nann said the agreement gives Allegro access to the capabilities needed to take its chemistry to the next stage.
“Long-duration storage is no longer principally a question of whether the world needs it. The challenge is how we manufacture and deploy it at the scale the energy transition now requires,” he said.
From lab breakthrough to a scaling pathway
Allegro’s technology has moved through several funding and development stages. Nann began researching microemulsion chemistry in 2005, before founding the company after relocating to Australia via New Zealand.
In 2023, Origin Energy, one of Australia’s largest utilities, acquired a 5% equity stake in Allegro. The stake came alongside investors Melt Ventures and Impact Ventures, as part of an AU$17.5 million (US$11.36 million) Series A funding round.
That investment underpinned a pilot agreement to trial Allegro’s flow battery at Origin’s Eraring Power Station in New South Wales. The trial began with an 800kWh system, with the potential to scale to a 5MW/60MWh, 12-hour duration installation.
Allegro subsequently completed Australia’s first locally manufactured microemulsion flow battery ahead of that trial.
The company also received AU$1.85 million (US$1.17 million) in Australian federal government funding in early 2025 to help scale production capability. The government cited Allegro’s suitability for a long-duration energy storage market it estimated could exceed AU$3 trillion globally by 2040.
Nann has previously argued that Allegro’s technology compares favourably with lithium-ion over the long term, once the full lifetime cost of a battery is taken into account, including replacement and recycling. He told ESN Premium the company was “beating lithium quite easily in the long-term” on that basis.
The partnership comes as electricity grids globally face growing demand for storage capable of shifting renewable energy across longer periods. Allegro said this trend has been accelerated by the power demands of data centres, alongside rising wind and solar penetration.
Lithium-ion has dominated the battery storage market to date. But its typical 2-4 hour duration has left a gap for technologies purpose-built for longer applications, an opportunity that a broader field of Australian companies has also been pursuing.
Allegro has separately been developing microemulsion flow battery systems aimed at supporting data centre power infrastructure, reflecting the same demand driver cited in the Jena Batteries agreement.
For Allegro, the partnership offers a path to gigawatt-scale manufacturing without having to build that capacity independently. It pairs Australian-developed intellectual property with an established international production platform.
Nann framed the arrangement as part of a broader ambition for the country’s role in the sector.
“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.”
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