Battery developer NantEnergy says it has “broken the manufacturing cost barrier” of US$100 per kilowatt-hour for its zinc-air technology.
NantEnergy— formerly Fluidic Energy— said manufacturing at scale will be available in 2019, “providing a competitive source of energy compared to other energy storage technologies”.
Chairman Patrick Soon-Shiong told last week’s One Planet Summit in New York the move would make “carbon free energy affordable and accessible in developing countries”.
Soon-Shiong said tests of the zinc energy-storage systems have already been used to help power villages in Africa and Asia, as well as telecoms towers in the US for the last six years— without any backup from utilities or the electric grid.
NantEnergy said its energy systems are monitored in real time in the Cloud and have been successfully deployed in nine countries, with more than 3,000 systems supporting 110 villages and 1,000 installations across cell tower sites. “Over 100 patents cover this breakthrough zinc-air technology which represents an important alternative to lithium-ion batteries,” the company said.
NantEnergy CEO Chuck Ensign said: “We have made the safest, de-risked, globally-deployed system in the world with a six-year history of over 1,000,000 cycles to date.”
