British technology start-up Powervault has raised £700,000 to fund plans to bring a deep cycle lead-acid battery home energy storage unit to market.
The London-based company, which sourced the money on Crowdcube, hopes to compete with Tesla and become the leading player in the UK’s home energy storage market.
The 2kWh and 4 kWh products are one of the only domestic lead-acid ESSs on the market, and are sold as a complete ESS in a box – including charger/inverter and control system.
They can store electricity generated by solar panels, and at an installed price of £2,000 -£2,800, they are less than Tesla’s Powerwall too.
Joe Warren, managing director at Powervault, told BEST they were planning to launch a lithium-ion version of the product in the future.
He added: “Tesla have done great work in raising awareness of domestic energy storage.
“Three months ago, if you’d asked someone what energy storage was, they wouldn’t have known. Now everyone has heard it.
“There are around 650,000 homes with solar PV panels in the UK and it is estimated that this could be 2,000,000 homes by 2020. Only a tiny proportion of these homes have any energy storage capability – so there is a large and growing market to address.”
