Australian long-duration energy storage company Allegro Energy has formed strategic partnership with Jena Batteries and its parent company, Suqian Time Energy Technology, to accelerate the commercial deployment of Allegro’s next-generation flow battery technology.
The partnership brings together Allegro’s proprietary microemulsion electrolyte technology with Jena Batteries’ large-scale manufacturing capability and expertise in flow battery production and system integration.
The companies plan to deploy pilot systems in Australia to demonstrate the technology at increasing scale before exploring opportunities in international markets.
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Allegro Energy has developed a water-based microemulsion electrolyte designed to overcome some of the cost, safety and performance limitations that have historically constrained long-duration battery storage.
The technology uses readily available materials and is non-flammable, making it particularly suited to applications where batteries need to operate safely and economically over long durations and through repeated cycling.
Allegro Energy CEO Thomas Nann said the agreement gives Allegro access to precisely the capabilities required to take its technology to the next level.
“Long-duration storage is no longer principally a question of whether the world needs it. The challenge is how we manufacture and deploy it at the scale the energy transition now requires,” Nann said.
“Allegro has spent years developing the chemistry. Jena Batteries brings significant manufacturing and system integration capability.
Combining those strengths gives us a pathway to take an Australian-developed technology and prove that it can be manufactured and deployed at commercial scale.”
Jena Batteries and Suqian Time Energy Technology bring experience in the manufacture and integration of flow battery systems, providing an established platform through which Allegro’s electrolyte technology can be incorporated into Gigawatt-scale energy storage solutions.
The agreement comes as electricity grids worldwide face a rapidly growing requirement for storage capable of shifting renewable energy over longer periods. This has been hastened by the power demands of data centres.
While lithium-ion batteries have become an important part of the storage market, the load profile of data centres and increasing penetration of wind and solar is creating demand for technologies designed specifically for longer-duration applications.
For Allegro, the partnership also establishes a potential bridge between Australian/New Zealand intellectual property and international manufacturing scale without requiring the company to build that manufacturing capability entirely from scratch.
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“The opportunity for Australia isn’t simply to deploy batteries invented and manufactured somewhere else,” Nann said.
“We have the science and engineering capability to develop important new storage technologies here. Partnerships like this give Australian innovation a credible pathway into global manufacturing and global markets.”
