US-based weapons and aerospace firm Lockheed Martin has entered the energy storage sector with a new company focusing on new lithium-ion and flow battery chemistry.
Under the name Lockeed Martin Energy, the weapons firm has launched two systems with shorter and longer duration capabilities.
Lockheed’s first product is an integrated AC lithium-ion system, the Gridstar Energy Storage System, with battery and thermal management and AC interconnections all engineered for single-side access.
The 250 kilowatts/500 kilowatt-hour system can be configured for smaller or larger deployments in commercial and industrial applications and small to medium-sized utility projects.
The firm’s second battery, the GridStar Flow, is being aimed at longer duration applications.
The flow battery chemistry was developed by the Sun Catalytix Corporation, a Cambridge, Massachusetts start-up that Lockheed acquired in 2014. It worked on a catalyst that ‘mimicked photosynthesis with inorganic chemistry’, according to MIT professor Daniel Nocera.
Sun Catalytix shifted its technology to flow battery energy storage technology, and that is what Lockheed Martin aims to market.
“Flow battery materials such as zinc bromide or vanadium and their solutes are caustic,” said Lockheed product manager Brad Fiebig, who added the Sun Catalytix technology relied on an ‘engineered molecule’ that was a platform for combinations of transition metal ions and ligands, rather than the acids used in many flow batteries.
“Our coordinated chemistry flow battery (CCFB) drives down costs and increases safety, performance and site-ability over traditional flow battery systems,” he said.
