By GREGORY ZELLER //
These are busy days for StorEn Technologies, a Stony Brook-based startup reinventing battery power on a global scale.
For starters, the 2017 startup – which is in the process of miniaturizing, and then commercializing, vanadium-flow battery technology – has now eclipsed $6 million in private investments, thanks primarily to a runaway-success crowdfunding campaign.
Launched in September 2020, the campaign – slated to remain open for three full years – has already racked up $6.4 million (and counting), according to CEO Carlo Brovero, who co-founded the company with CTO Angelo D’Anzi, Senior Engineers Gianluca Piraccini and Maurizio Tappi and advisor Gabriele Colombo, all Italian innovators who pursued their vanadium-flow dreams to America.
“We have not decided when we will stop [the crowdfunding campaign],” Brovero told Innovate Long Island. “We authorized it originally for 36 months, so we’ll have to decide when to stop this one, and maybe plan another one.”
Whenever the current campaign ends, Brovero knows exactly what the startup will do with its impressive haul: automate assembly of “the stack,” which the CEO described as “the core of the technology.”
Carlo Brovero: Scaling up.
Rechargeable vanadium-flow batteries, which use vanadium ions in different oxidation states to store chemical potential energy, have been proven to work: They already exist throughout major industry, used primarily as backup power sources.
But they’re big – too big for residential or light-industrial uses – and by leveraging cutting-edge nanotechnologies, StorEn is focused on producing smaller, condensed prototypes suitable for smaller-load markets, including light commercial and residential applications.
Currently, the company manually builds the stack – essentially, piled metal plates held together by metal bars – for each battery unit. It’s a “very tedious job,” according to Brovero, and “our next challenge is to complete an automatic assembly plant for the stack.”
Boosted by the crowdfunding windfall, that automation process will be a U.S.-based project, the CEO noted.
“We are scaling up in the [United States],” he added.
Even as its U.S. developments pick up steam, the early-stage enterprise is wowing them in Australia, with its proprietary tech undergoing a lengthy shakedown at the Queensborough-based National Battery Testing Centre.
The trial run is going well, although a coming delay may slow things a bit for a few months.
“The National Batter Testing Centre is moving to a new facility in Brisbane,” Brovero noted. “We are targeting going down to Australia around February, removing the battery from the old location and reinstalling it at the new location.”
Batteries included: As StorEn Technologies evolves, things only get smaller.
That disruption, unfortunately, is unavoidable – but early accounts of the vanadium-flow battery’s performance at the current testing center are very promising.
“They are still collecting and collating data to produce a final report of the testing over a longer period of time,” Brovero said. “But from what they tell us, it’s going fine and they’re happy.”
Also happy, and piling on the positivity, is the Accelerate New York Seed Fund, which issued a convertible $100,000 note to StorEn in 2019 and has now converted it – officially becoming a company shareholder.
“That’s a good sign of confidence,” Brovero noted.
With confidence soaring, the company has brought aboard a veteran-level executive to supercharge its marketing initiatives. John Davis – who’s logged three decades of international experience with battery and fuel cell innovators including Canadian battery concern ZincNyx and Australian battery builder RedFlow Ltd – has been named StorEn’s director of business development.
“John has 30 years of experience in energy storage and flow batteries – a wealth of experience and industry knowledge,” Brovero said. “The help he’s giving us is tremendous.
John Davis: Been around the energy block.
“Because John has been there already, he cuts down my trial-and-error,” the CEO added. “He knows people, he knows suppliers, he knows who’s reliable and who’s not, and he can really point me in the right direction.
“I really value him.”
That insider savvy will loom large as the longtime client of Stony Brook University’s Clean Energy Business Incubator Program pushes toward commercialization. StorEn is nearly ready to release a “commercial and industrial battery” for smaller-scale markets, with Davis leading the search for a U.S. partner company capable of “containerizing” the unit.
“We essentially host the battery in a shipping container,” Brovero noted. “We should be able to announce an agreement (with a manufacturer) signed within a month.
“And then we will be producing these industrial batteries soon,” he added. “We should begin producing the batteries in February or March of next year.”
