Norwegian lithium-ion battery gigafactory group FREYR has signed a conditional offtake agreement with energy storage system integrator Powin Energy totalling 28.5GWh over six years.
Under the agreement, FREYR will deliver 28.5GWh of battery cells to Powin from 2024-2030. Initially, the cells will be supplied from its gigafactories in Mo i Rana, Norway, before later coming from FREYR’s planned facility in the US. The Mo i Rana facilities will open in 2023-24 while the US site, a joint venture with Koch Strategic Platforms, should open by 2030.
Powin will integrate FREYR’s batteries into its battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions across the globe. The Oregon-based company is the fifth-largest system integrator in the world according to IHS Markit.
FREYR’s gigafactories in Norway will be almost entirely powered by renewable energy, mainly hydropower but also some wind, and will use 60% less power than conventional lithium-ion production, the company said. “We have the ambition to produce the world’s cleanest or greenest batteries,” CEO Tom Jensen told Energy-Storage.news in a recent interview.
The agreement with Powin brings FREYR’s cumulative offtake agreements announced to-date to 78.8GWh, after a 19GWh agreement with Honeywell and a 31GWh agreement with an unnamed energy storage solutions partner. Energy-storage.news has asked FREYR to confirm Powin is not the unnamed company and will update the story when a response is received.
The cumulative offtake agreements add up to 67% of the projected nameplate capacity of FREYR’s Mo i Rana factories and more than 90% of targeted production under current ramp-up and operational efficiency assumptions.
Jensen told Energy-Storage.news in the interview that FREYR could dedicate half of its 2030 annual production capacity, 100GWh, to energy storage. All major offtake announcements so far have been in energy storage, perhaps unsurprisingly given all its initial production will be of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.
