In an open letter issued yesterday, Ronald J. Mosso, CEO, EnerVault Corporation stated: "As of today, EnerVault is seeking new owners for its redox flow battery technology, which has been successfully demonstrated in the field at the megawatt-hour scale. The present owners are unable, each for their own reasons, to fund completion of our second generation system development and launch full scale commercialization. The purpose of this announcement is to accelerate new financing, preserve value, and to bring this important energy storage technology to the utility market.
“I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished. We have completed commissioning and third-party certification testing of the world’s largest iron-chromium redox flow battery at our field site near Turlock, California. This novel battery system has met its U.S. Department of Energy project objectives and met or exceeded all design performance targets. In delivering this system to the field, EnerVault has assembled a world-class team with deep experience in electrochemistry, energy systems, and global energy markets. We have developed significant intellectual property around iron-chromium chemistry, redox flow battery architecture, energy storage control systems. In preparation for full scale commercialization, we have established strategic supplier partnerships to implement our cost reduction roadmap and provide reliable systems to large power network customers.
“When the company was launched, most utilities and regulators saw the benefits of stationary energy storage as hypothetical and limited in practical application by the maturity of available technology. EnerVault’s founders, investors, and other supporters foresaw the growing market need for utility-scale, long duration energy storage. The leadership team identified the market gap in storage duration between integrated cell technologies and site-limited pumped hydro–EnerVault’s products bridge this gap.
“While the global market for large-scale, stationary storage is now underway with multiple gigawatt-hours of procurements , regulatory hurdles and utility purchasing requirements continue to impede the adoption of emerging technologies. Regulatory entities, which want to assure a diverse, competitive market that cost effectively serves current and future requirements, are starting to address these impediments. Policy changes and utility adoption of large scale, long duration energy storage systems have not come fast enough for EnerVault to complete the financing of the last steps of its development and commercialization program. I am confident that the new owners of EnerVault will see the tremendous value that we have created over the past 6 years. The will also see the value of EnerVault’s pipeline of multi-year opportunities with leading customers, and the relatively short development path from our completed megawatt-hour demonstration system to commercial product revenue,†Mosso’s letter concluded.â€
