California energy storage start-up Romeo Power has completed construction of a 113,000 square-foot lithium-ion battery pack manufacturing facility in Los Angeles.
The announcement comes three months after Romeo— which boasts a workforce including “top engineers and designers” from business rivals Tesla— secured $30 million in seed financing.
Romeo co-founder and CEO Michael Patterson said completion of the fully automated plant “is both proof and promise of our place in the new energy economy”.
The facility is slated to produce 1GWh by the end of this year and quadruple capacity by 2018. Romeo claims it has already secured $65m worth of initial orders for its products since it started selling this year. All are scheduled for delivery in 2018.
All Romeo battery packs for electric vehicles and stationary applications are being designed, engineered, tested and produced on site. “The battery packs are designed and optimised based on specific power and energy density needs, ranging in size from 1kWh to 1MWh,” the company said.
Romeo co-founder and chief technology officer Porter Harris (pictured), who developed the battery technology powering SpaceX’s F9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, has said the firm’s technology platform offered:
· The highest energy density by 25%, “providing dramatically-increased range”;
· Highest thermal performance, “optimised for the fastest charge times, decreasing standard battery charge times by 15% to 30%;
· Superior safety, with all designs “built with inherent thermal runaway mitigation and featuring multiple fault-tolerant software and hardware to protect against cross-cell propagation”.