Chinese energy storage manufacturer Hithium has begun production at its new long-duration energy storage (LDES) manufacturing base in Heze, Shandong Province.
The company held a production rollout ceremony at the Heze Base on 7 August. Hithium describes the development as the world’s first integrated industrial park dedicated exclusively to long-duration energy storage.
The project covers a planned area of approximately 80 hectares and represents an investment of more than RMB13 billion ($1.81 billion) across the battery supply chain.
The industrial park includes the manufacture of lithium iron phosphate battery cells, modules and complete energy storage systems, alongside new materials and upstream raw material production.
Hithium has not disclosed the overall production capacity of the completed industrial park or the discharge duration of the storage products it will manufacture.
The Heze Base is equipped with Hithium’s fifth-generation battery manufacturing lines. The company said each line can provide more than 15 GWh of annual production capacity.
Compared with its previous-generation production lines, Hithium claims the new equipment reduces the factory space required per GWh by 50%, manufacturing labour by 58% and energy consumption by 13%, while increasing production efficiency by 200%.
The lines have an automation rate of more than 95% and incorporate over 1,000 quality-control checkpoints, including AI-based visual inspection.
Wang Pengcheng, co-founder and CEO of Hithium and chairman of Shandong Hithium, said: “The production rollout marks a new phase for the Heze Base in scalable manufacturing, market-oriented delivery, and ecosystem development. Building on this new foundation, Hithium will continue to advance our ‘three pillars of leadership’:
“Industrial leadership – building a national benchmark industrial cluster for LDES. With the Heze LDES integrated industrial park as the ‘core engine’, Hithium will gather upstream and downstream partners to cover the full ‘generation-transmission-distribution-consumption’ application ecosystem.
“Product leadership – defining full-scenario LDES solutions. Hithium has taken the lead in defining and deploying LDES solutions. Leveraging the Base’s scaled capacity, Hithium will fully unleash the manufacturing potential of thousand-ampere-hour large-capacity products, ushering the global lithium-based LDES industry into an era of large-scale delivery.
“Production efficiency leadership – building global competitiveness through integrated intelligent manufacturing. Fully equipped with independently developed fifth-generation intelligent manufacturing lines, the Base enables end-to-end synergistic integration across core materials, cell manufacturing, system integration, and global delivery, ensuring our ability to deliver large-scale, high-efficiency, and high-quality products to markets worldwide.”
Photo: Hithium describes its new Shandong facility as “the world’s first LDES integrated industrial park”
Credit: Hithium
