US-headquartered battery storage system integrator Powin Energy has signed a 12GWh cell supply agreement with Chinese battery maker REPT Battero.
The deal, signed 29 April, was reported yesterday by China-based automotive news website Gasgoo, and subsequently confirmed as correct to Energy-Storage.news by a source close to Powin Energy.
The source added that the new framework agreement is essentially a renewal of the 12-month, 3GWh supply deal for lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells signed between the two companies last year, as reported by this site in April 2023.
At that time, Powin said REPT, which was founded as recently as 2017, made batteries which “excelled” at meeting industry-wide standards for safety, as well as the Oregon-headquartered integrator’s “own evaluation framework”.
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The new deal covers supply of REPT’s Wending 320Ah cell. There is a growing trend for battery energy storage system (BESS) project developers to seek higher energy density containerised systems with the standard 20-foot configuration.
Several major cell manufacturers, mainly from China, are putting out cells with capacity exceeding 300Ah, including EVE Energy’s launch of Mr. Big, an aptly named 628Ah product. Meanwhile containerised systems from the likes of Jinko Solar, Trina Storage and others are now typically packing in 5MWh capacity into the 20-ft containers.
CATL, another of Powin’s cell suppliers, recently launched its own grid-scale containerised solution with up to 6.25MWh capacity, while REPT also has a 345Ah version of the Wending cell.
A month or so before that announcement, Energy-Storage.news Premium heard from Powin Energy senior VP Danny Lu that the US company is developing a high energy density next-generation product for its modular BESS platform Centipede, which could allow it to compete with the growing ranks of system integrators and solution providers coming out of China.
Powin currently procures cells from at least five vendors. This multiple vendor strategy is in evidence at the Waratah Super Battery project in New South Wales (NSW), Australia which Powin is delivering for developer Akaysha Energy. REPT products are being used at the ‘Super Battery’ alongside cells from EVE Energy—the latter signing a 10GWh deal with the integrator last summer.
Meanwhile, for REPT, it marks the latest in a series of deals with players in the international BESS market.
In April Energy-Storage.news reported that it had entered a long-term supply deal of undisclosed volume in the US for Wending 320Ah cells with Prevalon, the BESS spinout of Mitsubishi Power Americas.
In May 2023 it announced a 10GWh supply deal with gravity storage tech startup-turned lithium-ion BESS integrator Energy Vault, and in August it signed up with developer Vena Energy for a potential clean energy hub project in Indonesia.
REPT’s multiple gigawatt-hour deals in 2023 were notable for their scale as the manufacturer was ranked as a Tier 2 manufacturer according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. In prior years, most deals of that size were brokered by Tier 1 players.
