Powin Energy has signed its latest multiple gigawatt-hour deal with a major battery manufacturer, with some of the supplied cells to be used in its Waratah Super Battery project.
The US-headquartered energy storage system integrator said yesterday (15 June) that it has sealed a 10GWh supply agreement with Chinese Tier 1 manufacturer EVE Energy.
It’s Powin’s second multi-year deal with EVE, following a two-year “gigawatt-scale” contract in 2021. While the exact size of that deal was not disclosed at the time, Powin said EVE’s cells would be used in nearly 500MWh of projects during that year.
Powin Energy executive VP Danny Lu told Energy-Storage.news in 2021 that his company had “every intention” of renewing its contract with the manufacturer after the two year term, and it looks as though that has played out as expected.
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Reasons given for selecting the supplier at the time included its 20-year performance guarantee, but also that EVE met a criteria of being able to provide lithium battery cells with the right prismatic form factor to drop into Powin’s rack and module designs for its battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions.
“By combining Powin’s deep industry expertise with our state-of-the-art LFP battery technology, we are poised to deliver sustainable energy storage solutions at an unprecedented scale,” EVE Energy VP Steve Chen said yesterday.
EVE Energy is currently in the process of opening six new battery production plants with annual capacity of 60GWh, targeting reaching 200GWh annual capacity, which would make it among the biggest players in the industry today. It serves multiple battery markets with products that include consumer electronics, prismatic LFP cells, pouch NMC cells, and many more.
For Powin, it also marks the next step in its work to deliver the Waratah Super Battery, which is being constructed in New South Wales. The project, described by the government of the Australian state as like being a “giant shock absorber” for the electricity grid, will be contracted to supply 700MW/1,400MWh of system protection from events that can cause disruptions, such as lightning strikes. It is anticipated that the BESS itself will be sized larger than that to be able to capture merchant market opportunities too.
Working with Blackrock-owned developer Akaysha Power on the Waratah Super Battery, Powin recently enlisted Korean contract manufacturer ACE Engineering to manufacture the Powin BESS platform to be used for half of the project’s capacity.
Powin Energy recently also signed a 12-month, 3GWh battery cell supply deal with Rept, another Chinese manufacturer, which was notable in that Rept is classified Tier 2 by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. As noted by Energy-Storage.news in April as that deal was announced, Powin’s suppliers are a mix of Tier 1 makers like CATL and EVE, as well as non-Tier 1.
Being able to get hold of batteries in time and on budget has been one of the key challenges for companies in the BESS space in recent years as the industry’s demand for lithium batteries grows in tandem with that from electric vehicles (EVs).
‘Flexible approach’
Powin’s Danny Lu has previously said that the company would like to be able to source cells from domestically-headquartered manufacturers for its US projects and hopes to do so in future.
The company did recently appoint contract manufacturer Jabil to start producing Powin’s Stack750E utility-scale BESS product in Florida, US, for integration into the Powin Centipede platform. Production will start in Q4 this year with an initial annual production capacity of 2GWh, with plans to double that over time.
Energy-Storage.news spoke about Powin’s strategy in a recent interview with company president Anthony Carroll (Premium access). Carroll said that while five years ago the role of a system integrator in the grid-scale space was in testing equipment and assuring customers that components like battery cells work properly, today it is “more about how can we build the massive amount of storage that we know the world needs with a very flexible approach”.
“We have five cell vendors, we have five factories, and we are the connecting tissue for all of that from BMS, EMS, the inverters, the power plant controller, we’ve created the Powin ecosystem,” Carroll said.
