Eos Energy Storage has released its second big announcement of the month, a funding boost that includes funding from NRG Energy, a major US energy company.
I just featured a long post on Eos Energy Storage less than a month ago, followed soon after by a post on its first pilot project (with Con Edison). Click that first one above for all kinds of details on the company’s energy storage technology. The essentials, however, are simply that Eos Energy Storage has developed a grid storage solution that is much cheaper than what has been on the market up until now. Of course, it has just launched its first pilot project, so we have to wait until it actually gets to market, but according to the company, that should be in 2014.
The Eos Aurora battery is projected to cost $1,000/kW or $160/kWh. The cycle life is 10,000 full cycles (30 year life). And the storage system has a 75% round-trip efficiency. As such, the LCOE is very competitive. (Click to enlarge.)
In the press release sent out late yesterday, Eos announced that it had raised $15 million Series B financing “with participation from a syndicate of 21 strategic and financial investors.” One very notable investor this round is NRG Energy. As the release notes, NRG Energy has “the nation’s largest independent power generation portfolio of fossil fuel, nuclear, solar and wind facilities.” Despite having its hands in some not so clean sources, it has been heavily focused on diversifying into clean energy and potentially disruptive technology solutions. This is the first time NRG has invested in an energy storage company.
“Eos’s technology is of strategic interest to NRG as we seek to enhance the value of our generation assets and evaluate novel energy storage business opportunities,” said Denise Wilson, NRG Executive Vice President and President, New Businesses. “We have confidence in Eos’s technology, its management team and the compelling value proposition the company will provide to the marketplace.”
Another investor Eos highlighted is Fisher Brothers, “a privately owned New York City-based real estate firm which also owns Plaza Construction, a contractor with experience building urban power plants and renewable energy projects.” The company is “a co-sponsor of the City Investment Fund (with Morgan Stanley), a founding member of Perella Weinberg Partners and a founding partner of Convergent Energy + Power, an energy storage asset development company with a pipeline of projects in New York, California and elsewhere.”
In addition to the Con Edison pilot project mentioned above, Eos says that it “is in advanced discussions with several states regarding the location of its pilot manufacturing facilities.” And it reaffirmed its goal of deploying Eos Aurora batteries in 2014.
Eos has now started its Series C investment round. This round is aimed at raising funds to produce and deliver, in 2014, Aurora energy storage systems for the utilities with which it has lined up partnerships. There’s no word yet on who those utility partners are, but Eos mentions that they extend beyond the US, and announcements are supposed to be coming in late spring or summer.
Eos contends that it has a relatively short path to profitability, which is based on its deals with utilities and a capital-efficient manufacturing plan. We’ll see.
To keep an eye on all the latest Eos Energy Storage news, bookmark our Eos archives.
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