Zinc-air flow battery company Zinc8 Energy Solutions has won US$9 million in state tax credits for its new manufacturing facility in Ulster County, New York.
The Vancouver-based company has been approved for a grant from Empire State Development, New York state’s development authority, in performance-based tax credits as part of the Excelsior Jobs Program.
The incentives are being offered to the company for locating its first commercial manufacturing facility in New York, which will manufacture long-duration energy storage systems (ESS). The company’s technology generates zinc particles using outside energy, stores them in potassium hydroxide electrolyte and combines them with oxygen to generate electricity before returning the byproduct (ZnO) back through the system.
The new plant will be located in the iPark 87 business park, which used to house a facility belonging to multinational technology firm IBM. Zinc8 will invest US$68 million in the site over five years and use it as its US head office.
It will be Zinc8’s first full-scale commercial manufacturing facility as it moves from small demonstrator projects, like an NYSERDA-supported 15-hour project announced one year ago, to large-scale commercialisation of its product.
The company has not yet revealed when the facility will start producing products but the five-year timeline implies it will reach full production capacity by 2028. Energy-Storage.news has approached it for comment and will update this article in due course.
Zinc8 CEO Rob MacDonald said: “The historic measures taken by New York State to reach ambitious carbon neutrality goals are driving clean energy innovation and Zinc8 is committed to being an integral part of New York’s green economy.”
The tax credits it is receiving at the state level are in addition to federal investment tax credits available for US clean energy manufacturing brought as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
MacDonald wrote a guest blog discussing zinc as a battery chemistry for Energy-Storage.news back in 2020. The company is one of a handful aiming to commercialise batteries using the abundant element, including Zinc Battery Initiative members ZincFive, Salient Energy, Urban Electric Power, e-Zinc, Redflow, Enzinc, Enerpoly, ZAF Energy Systems, AEsir Technologies, Inc., and Imprint Energy.
Another is Eos Energy Enterprises, a firm much further ahead in commercialising its zinc-based BESS product than the others. In September, the US Department of Energy Loan Programs Office started due diligence for a loan application from Eos, which is aiming for an annual production capacity of 3GWh on US soil.
See more Energy-Storage.news coverage of the zinc battery storage space here.
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