A Michigan-based energy storage technology company, Our Next Energy, agreed to locate its Aries Grid battery storage system manufacturing facility in West Virginia at a 420 MWh microgrid business site being developed by Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables (BHE Renewables).
Plans call for ONE to use a 40,000 sq. ft. industrial building already located at the site to assemble a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) utility-scale battery system that can serve as long-duration energy storage.
ONE said it expects the $20 million manufacturing facility to be operational in 2025, with hiring to start in 2024.
Aries Grid will be offered in 2-, 3-, and 6-MWh modular units. The lithium-ion energy storage system uses an LFP cathode chemistry. The company said that chemistry doubles the lifetime energy throughput of the nickel, cobalt and manganese (NCM) chemistries which make up most commercially available stationary energy storage systems. Discharge times range from 4 to 12 hours, and the product is aimed to provide firm capacity baseload to power factories, data centers and communities.
Last September, BHE Renewables bought more than 2,000 acres in Ravenswood, West Virginia, to be developed as a $500 million renewable energy microgrid-powered industrial site.
Precision Castparts, part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway business, agreed to be the first company to locate at the site. Plans call for it to develop a titanium melt facility that will use renewable energy to manufacture titanium products for the aerospace and other industries.
The land was previously owned by the West Virginia Economic Development Authority and is the site of a former aluminum plant.
BHE Renewables owns and operates solar, wind, hydroelectric and geothermal projects with a combined generation capacity of 4,198 MW. An additional 970 MW of capacity is generated at four natural gas fueled combined cycle plants in New York, Illinois, Texas, and Arizona.
