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10-kW Organic Redox Flow Battery Prototype Completed

October 02, 2016 by Jeff Shepard

Kemwatt has designed, assembled, and tested a 10-kW industrial prototype of an Organic Redox Flow Battery that can store electricity from renewable sources to support smart grids and microgrids. This development follows a fundraising round of €1.2 million with its investors, investment funds Go Capital and Emertec, Ouest Valorisation, Pierre-Yves Divet and its founders (two scientists of the Institute of Chemical Sciences of Rennes, Florence Geneste and Didier Floner, and the CEO, François Huber).

Based on its innovative chemistry and stack, this very first non-corrosive Organic Redox Flow Battery of industrial size required two years of development from the French startup and represents a major step for the expansion of renewable energy, smart grids and microgrids around the world.

Renewable development still faces intermittency challenges. Redox Flow Batteries can provide a storage answer that stores energy, generated from wind or solar power, chemically in liquid electrolytes. Before now, these batteries used highly-acidic, corrosive electrolytes resulting in reliability, lifetime, safety and environmental issues.

Kemwatt’s Organic Redox Flow Battery is non-corrosive and its alkaline chemistry and more natural molecules make large-scale storage possible, whether for industrial purposes or remote areas.

With a team of 9 people, Kemwatt develops an innovative redox flow battery technology for the world market of energy storage, for which it has received several awards. Spurred by the relentless growth of renewable energy, the energy storage market should be extremely dynamic in the next few years and redox flow batteries are in a key position to benefit from this since they can store hours of high power production (MW). The proceeds of this round will be used to further the industrial development of the technology, test the first demonstrators and expand the contacts made with markets in the European Union and the United States.