According to MIT Technology Review, investors recently chipped in $15 million to fund battery startup EOS Energy Storage, a company that says its batteries could eventually compete with natural-gas power plants to provide power during times of peak demand. It plans to build a pilot manufacturing plant by the end of the year or early next year, and to start making full-size one-megawatt batteries by the end of 2014.
EOS wants to produce batteries that cost as little as $160 per kilowatt-hour and last for 30 years. Current batteries that cheap would fail after only a couple of years of service. The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal of batteries at $100 per kilowatt-hour that can be recharged 5,000 times with 80 percent efficiency, saying that at that point batteries could be widely adopted for grid storage. EOS says its batteries can last 10,000 charges, which could make up for the higher upfront cost and lower efficiency of its batteries.
But the company hasn't reached its goals yet. It says it's "well within" $300 per kilowatt-hour. EOS has completely charged and discharged the most recent iteration of its battery cells over 1,000 times, and the batteries have so far retained 90 percent of their capacity. EOS says it's teaming up with seven utility companies to test the battery and design it to the performance specifications they need—it will announce the partners in the next couple of weeks.
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