Cameron Dales (L), president and chief industrial officer of Peak Energy, and Landon Mossburg, the CEO of Peak Energy, on a hike within the earliest days of the corporate. The mountains of Colorado within the background inspired the name of the corporate, Peak Energy.
Photo courtesy Peak Energy
Battery industry veterans are coming together to launch Peak Energy, which goals to mass-produce giant batteries to even out production fluctuations from renewable energy sources, like wind and solar energy generators.
Because Peak Energy is concentrated on scaling up production of battery technology that already exists, they do not consider themselves as a standard “startup.”
“A standard Silicon Valley startup is 10 years within the lab, provide you with a greater mousetrap and go to market. We’re completely the alternative,” Cameron Dales, president and chief industrial officer of Peak Energy, told CNBC in a video interview Friday.
Peak Energy hopes to partner with a technology company (yet to be chosen) that’s already an authority in battery technology but doesn’t have the capability to scale manufacturing.
“Within the battery promote it seems the rarest commodity just isn’t the technology — there are numerous excellent ideas on the market at academic labs and startups — but somewhat the power to scale to manufacturing,” CEO Landon Mossburg told CNBC. “The issue of producing scale up is one in every of the explanations you see so many ‘breakthrough battery technology’ announcements but very only a few firms who actually reach market.”
Peak Energy launched in June and is coming out of stealth on Wednesday, announcing a $10 million funding round lead by Greg Reichow at Eclipse, a Silicon Valley enterprise capital firm. Before joining Eclipse, Reichow worked at Tesla for greater than five years, where he was chargeable for battery, motor and electronics manufacturing after which led global manufacturing. Also joining the funding raise is TDK Ventures, the company enterprise capital arm of the Tokyo-headquartered multinational electronics company TDK.
“The No. 1 issue we face because it relates to expanding renewable energy sources is storage,” Reichow told CNBC. “This problem should be solved, but the present approaches using lithium-ion and other technologies aren’t yet at a price point that allows the form of scaling that society needs across sectors.”
Demand for grid-scale storage will proceed to grow. The United States Energy Information Administration has projected that battery storage capability will grow from 9 gigawatts in 2022 to 49 gigawatts in 2030 after which to 247 gigawatts in 2050. That is a baseline projection that features the Inflation Reduction Act and assumes no additional changes in U.S. policy throughout the projection period.
(L to R) Ryan Gibson, Eclipse Enterprise partner; Landon Mossburg, Peak Energy CEO; Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Eclipse partner and Cameron Dales, Peak Energy president and chief industrial officer, in protective gear at a battery factory clean room.
Photo courtesy Peak Energy
A stacked team with aggressive growth goals
Peak Energy remains to be in its very early days. There are about 10 employees and a business office in San Francisco.
But that headcount will triple in coming months, and Peak Energy goals to construct its first prototype battery systems, with individual batteries sure together into larger systems using batteries sourced from a 3rd party in 2024. By 2030, Peak says it’s going to be producing “double digit gigawatt” quantities of battery cells for its own battery systems and for other applications.
That is no small feat. It takes between $50 million and $100 million per gigawatt to construct a battery factory, and a 30-gigawatt factory would employ between 2,000 and three,000 people and be between 1 and a couple of million square feet, Mossburg told CNBC.
It’s an aggressive and expensive buildout plan, but Mossburg has done this type of rapid production scale up before when he worked at Northvolt, a battery manufacturing company that launched in 2016 in Sweden. Northvolt was founded by Peter Carlsson, who was the worldwide head of sourcing and provide chain at Tesla from 2011 to 2015, and Mossburg joined 2017. After 18 months, Northvolt had 300 people, and grew to 4,000 people by the point Mossburg left 4 years later.
Cameron Dales and US Representative Rho Kana in 2021 on the Enovix battery factory in Fremont, Calif.
Photo courtesy Cameron Dales
After all, Peak Energy could have to raise more cash to fund this type of expansion. Quite a bit more.
“We’re running a playbook which I and the remaining of the chief team initially demonstrated and deployed at Northvolt,” Mossburg told CNBC. Northvolt also began with a small seed round of funding and ended up raising greater than $9 billion in a mix of equity and debt. Mossburg was involved with securing all of that financing apart from probably the most recent $1.2 billion announced in August.
Dales has similar experience. He co-founded a fabric sciences innovation company, Symyx Technologies, which went public in 1999, then joined the battery company Enovix.
“I believed naively, ‘Well, how hard could batteries be? It’s only a plus and a minus, everybody has a Duracell. How hard could it’s?’ Little did I do know, 14 years later, I’d still be there,” Dales told CNBC. Enovix was making very high energy density batteries at a battery factory in Fremont, California, and is constructing one other one in Penang, Malaysia. The corporate went public in a billion-dollar-plus SPAC deal in 2021.
“Peak Energy’s team comprises of two industry veteran leaders who’ve scaled a battery company before,” Anil Achyuta, who lead the investment for TDK Ventures, said in a written statement shared with CNBC.
So, too, for Eclipse.
“Landon and I worked together at Tesla and I do know what he’s able to delivering,” Reichow told CNBC. “After leaving Tesla, he went on to construct a battery company as an executive at Northvolt. Similarly, Cam was a core a part of the founding team at Enovix and was instrumental in helping them construct the business. These are proven executives which have built battery firms in a few of the hardest spaces and that makes them unique.”
Why Peak Energy is specializing in sodium ion
Peak Energy is concentrated on making large sodium-ion battery systems to pair with wind and solar energy production facilities. Large grid-scale batteries can capture the energy generated from renewable sources, then hold that energy and dispatch it later when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining.
Peak Energy will make individual battery cells, in regards to the size of a loaf of bread, says Dales. Then those loaf of bread battery cells get wired together to make modules, which can be in regards to the size of a filing cabinet. Then those filing cabinets will likely be assembled right into a battery the scale of the back of a tractor trailer truck, then deployed near a solar or wind farm, 50 to 100 at a time.
100 blocks can power 62,500 homes for 4 hours, Mossburg told CNBC.
An artist rendering of the Peak Energy battery system.
Rendering courtesy Peak Energy.
Probably the most typical battery technology immediately is lithium ion, utilized in cellphones and electric vehicles, they usually are prized for his or her energy density. Sodium-ion batteries are less energy dense and heavier — bad for mobile devices or cars, but less relevant when it comes to grid-scale batteries.
“Weight, and due to this fact energy density, is far less vital in a stationary storage system. The undeniable fact that these batteries are less energy dense isn’t a giant consideration for this application,” Reichow told CNBC.
What does matter when you find yourself talking about storing huge quantities of energy is the fee.
“A rather more vital consideration is the fee per unit energy that you just’re able to store and that’s where sodium ion, we imagine, could have a giant advantage over lithium ion in the long run,” Reichow told CNBC.
It’s too early for Peak Energy to commit to a particular price for its battery systems, but a Tesla Megapack battery system costs about $1.3 million without installation, and Mossburg says he thinks Peak Energy may be at roughly half of that cost with its system.
As well as, lithium-ion batteries generally is a fire hazard and the electrical vehicle makers are eating up all available supply, Dales told CNBC. The issue utilities have is “the minute Ford or GM needs more batteries, mainly their contracts for lithium ion just get canceled and the suppliers just go for the automotive, since it’s today the biggest market,” Dales told CNBC.
Also, China dominates the battery market and provide chains immediately. “They’re the dominant player in batteries generally — by far — they’re massive when it comes to battery production,” Mossburg told CNBC. “And so they’re positioning to do the identical with sodium.”
Alun Thomas, Head of Manufacturing Engineering at Peak Energy, inside a battery production machine.
Photo courtesy Peak Energy
While Mossburg says he thinks it’s a profit for the world for america and China to proceed to trade, and Peak Energy is willing to work with Chinese partners, there are geopolitical risks related to depending on China completely. Peak Energy’s plan to manufacture in america is a geopolitical advantage, he says. (It is also more climate-conscious to make these giant batteries within the U.S. as opposed to making them in China and shipping them to the U.S.)
“You don’t need to be in a situation where a critical component of the energy infrastructure of your entire economy, which batteries are increasingly becoming, is principally sourced from a celebration you can’t ensure you are going to be friends with,” Mossburg told CNBC. “If the U.S. wants to proceed to have a strong economy, especially an economy that could make things like cars and even like high-tech things, ceding a whole industry that is this vital to some other player — doesn’t matter if it’s China or anyone else — is a dangerous prospect.”
The primary real gigantic battery factory on this planet was the Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory in Nevada, and Reichow led the event of that, Dales said. The second generation “arguably” was the factories that Mossburg built with Northvolt and that Dales helped construct at Enovix, Dales said. Peak Energy is “taking that learning and the individuals who developed those factories and we’re going after the third generation of factory design,” Dales told CNBC.
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