The BESSt Company, the battery company founded by Tesla alum Joley Michaelson, has launched a proprietary zinc-polyiodide redox flow battery designed for sectors that demand uninterrupted power, data centres, cold storage, and AI infrastructure.
It is based on chemistry licensed from the non-profit research and development firm Battelle and the platform offers multi-hour to multi-day energy storage.
The company said that long-duration energy storage (LDES) will be crucial to the energy transition and meeting rising energy demand and that LDES redox flow technologies are too bulky, site-restricted, or capital-intensive for widespread commercial and industrial use.
However, The BESSt Company’s redox flow battery claims to allow for renewable generation to be aligned with real-world usage, with power being banked, dispatched and controlled. It has up to 20 times the energy density of conventional vanadium flow batteries.
The chemistry is said to have improved safety, lifespan and operational flexibility, as supported by over 100 peer-reviewed studies and independently validated by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“Energy storage has always been the missing link,” said Joley Michaelson, founder and CEO, The BESSt Company. “Conventional lithium-ion can’t meet today’s uptime demands, and most long-duration systems are built for utility-scale projects, not the space and retrofit limits of real-world infrastructure. We designed this battery for those conditions at a cost that makes widespread deployment possible.”
Kevin Meagher, chief science officer, The BESSt Company, said, “It solves the problems that have held long-duration storage back. We built a system that stores power for days without performance loss, operates reliably in extreme conditions, and delivers predictable output when the grid can’t. That’s what the market needs: storage that behaves like true infrastructure.”
Image: A rendered graphic of the proprietary zinc-polyiodide redox flow battery from The BESSt company. Credit: The BESSt company.
