Down to Earth: start-up backed by Hong Kong tycoon Peter Lee aims to commercialise battery technology used in space

Down to Earth: start-up backed by Hong Kong tycoon Peter Lee aims to commercialise battery technology used in space

05 Apr Down to Earth: start-up backed by Hong Kong tycoon Peter Lee aims to commercialise battery technology used in space

Posted at 00:30h in Asia by

“The cost of our systems will be very competitive to the existing utility-scale energy storage products in the world,” Chan said on the sidelines of the One Earth Summit, a sustainability conference in Hong Kong, on March 25. “On a life cycle basis, EnerVenue’s storage is cheaper than the lithium-ion battery, and has superior durability, safety, versatility and sustainability.”

The start-up’s product can be charged and discharged 30,000 times without rest for 30 years, Chan said. It is fireproof, operable between minus 40 and 50 degrees Celsius and is 90 per cent recyclable.

Peter Lee Ka-kit, the billionaire founder of EnerVenue investor Full Vision Capital, is also co-chairman of property conglomerate Henderson Land Development, which was founded by his father, Lee Shau-kee. Photo: SCMP handout

Global energy storage investment was estimated to have surpassed US$35 billion last year, up from US$20 billion in 2022 and mostly deployed in power grids, according to the International Energy Agency.

The two main applications for high-capacity energy storage today are electric vehicles batteries and utility-scale systems. The latter – which is where EnerVenue is focused – are used in power grids to manage intermittent renewable electricity production, and act as backup power for industrial, commercial and residential buildings.

The nickel-hydrogen system being developed by EnerVenue competes with other grid storage technologies, such as lithium-ion, sodium sulphur, flow batteries and hydro pump, which stores energy by pumping water from a reservoir to another one at a higher elevation.

Lithium-ion batteries, which have a much higher energy density than nickel-hydrogen ones, have seen the fastest growth in commercial usage. Nickel-hydrogen batteries’ long lifespan and stability, however, mean they have been favoured for decades in satellites and other space applications.
Chan said EnerVenue is building its first 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) energy storage factory in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, which is expected to be completed by early next year. He said the company plans to build 5 to 10GWh of capacity in China and the US, but declined to disclose the investment and time frame.

02:22

China’s Shenzhou 16 mission sends its first civilian astronaut into space

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In 2021, Hong Kong and China Gas (Towngas), the city’s dominant piped gas supplier and a major natural gas distributor in mainland China, won an agreement to be an exclusive distributor of EnerVenue’s products in China. Towngas, where Chan is chief investment officer, is a minority shareholder of EnerVenue.

A year ago, EnerVenue announced that it will build its first 1 GWh factory in the US, on a 73-acre site – the size of 55 football fields – in the state of Kentucky, which will house design, manufacturing and testing facilities.

Subsequent phases of expansion, supported by generous local government tax incentives, could see the company increase its output capacity to over 20 GWh per year, at a total investment cost of over US$1 billion. EnerVenue had over 7GWh of customer commitments, it said at the time.

In late 2021, EnerVenue, co-founded by Stanford University materials science and engineering professor Cui Yi and Lee’s Full Vision, completed US$125 million of series A financing.

The round of fundraising was led by Texan oilfield services firm Schlumberger and drew investment from oil behemoth Saudi Aramco, Beijing-based investment firm IDG Capital, and Full Vision, to fund battery research, marketing and production scale-up in China and in the US.

“Back in 2018, we sat down with professor Cui in Stanford University to talk about the next generation of batteries,” Chan said. “He told us there is a solution, and then he and my team wrote on a piece of paper the intellectual properties involved, how the company will work and we formed EnerVenue with just five people.”

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