Powin Energy

Powin Energy ('Powin') was originally founded as Powin Corporation in 1989 by Joseph Lu and is based in Oregon, USA. Initially, the company manufactured, designed and provided logistics for consumer goods companies outsourcing production to China and Taiwan. Products were wide-ranging, varying from treadmills to gun safes.

 

Powin Corp began R&D for stationary energy storage in 2011, which became the sole focus in 2016. Despite its previous business being unrelated to energy, the company developed an expertise in supply chain logistics in Asia and applied this to its energy storage business. Indeed, it has leveraged deep connections to secure unique supply-side partnerships, such as with battery maker CATL.

 

Although initially a private company, Powin went public in 2010 as 'Powin Corp'. In 2016 this became 'Powin Energy Corp', or 'Powin Energy', with the renewed focus on stationary energy storage. In 2018, Powin Energy filed to become private once again, citing that its capital is mainly raised from affiliates and it would save money not having to produce yearly disclosures.

 

Today, Powin Energy targets scalable energy storage solutions for utilities, commercial & industrial sites, and EV fast-charging stations.

Powin Energy designs and assembles battery modules, packs and the final turnkey energy storage system using naked cells outsourced from battery makers in China. A controller is added to each module to balance charge across cells, and to each pack to balance charge across modules.

 

 

The company develops custom software for the Battery Management System (BMS), Energy Management System (EMS) and the Powin Cloud:

 

 

Developing custom software has led to many competitive advantages; for example, Powin commented the BMS used on other energy storage systems were based on BMS designs for electric vehicles (charge moves between internal cells for balancing). Powin's BMS uses AC power from the grid to balance the cells more effectively.

 

The company utilises LFP Li-ion cells 'for the safety component': it is harder for LFP cells to reach thermal runaway (versus NMC), and a lower cell voltage means energy is released more slowly in a thermal runaway event.

 

Another advantage is the manufacturing plants for LFP cells in China are highly mature, as LFP was the dominant Li-ion chemistry used in the early stages of China's electric car market.

 

 

In March 2019, Powin secured a supply contract for 1.85GWh of LFP battery cells from CATL through 2022. This is a unique agreement, and Powin is one of two companies to reach a deal with CATL outside of automotive applications. Components outside the 'DC box' are also manufactured by a third party; for example, inverters and converters are sourced from tier 1 suppliers such as SMA.

 

Before 2019, Powin sold an energy storage system branded eTrust for applications requiring no more than one-hour duration with a 1C or 2C power rate. The eTrust system utilised LFP cells from LISHEN, a smaller battery-maker also from China.

 

With CATL, the company's new energy storage products for 2020 have two-hour or four-hour durations, following the general market trend amid high demand for long-duration energy storage.

 

Powin's BMS and other control software / hardware is technically battery-agnostic and could be applied to NMC systems. However, for the time being, Powin is likely to stick with LFP only. With NMC, it is difficult to predict individual cell age compared to LFP, which has a flat, predictable voltage profile during charge / discharge (throughout cell lifetime). It is therefore relatively easy to augment an LFP system, and difficult to augment an NMC system (where new battery cells would be prone to accelerated ageing next to degraded cells).

 

 

Powin begins testing its new energy storage system at the stack level in December 2019 and expects its first deliveries in Q1 2020.

 

 

Powin currently sells energy storage systems directly to customers but will trial leasing options in 2020. It can sell DC stacks – a housing containing Li-ion modules for indoor use – or a turnkey, containerised energy storage system for outdoors, in DC or AC configurations.

 

 

The company's first grid-scale project was its 2MW / 8MWh Millikan Avenue system in Irvine California. This was contracted in August 2016 and became operational in January 2017. It began participating in the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) wholesale market, which lead Powin to develop a 'bidding optimisation' software, which can stand-alone separate to its hardware business.

 

Powin has 200MWh of energy storage commissioned YTD, and expects to double this in 2020 with an additional 200MWh-300MWh; it projects a further doubling of contracted energy storage in 2021.

 

In the USA, Powin is targeting California, Arizona, Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York. In central America, Powin has a 12MWh project in Mexico; in RoW, the company is targeting Australia & Europe (Italy & Spain).

 

The price of an uninstalled turnkey system depends on volume: for orders above 20MWh, Powin would price its system aggressively at lower than USD200 per kWh for a DC containerised solution (sold in 2020).

 

Systems under 20MWh would be priced at USD250-300 per kWh (also sold in 2020).

 

Powin's nameplate production capacity is 750MWh in Taiwan. This is expanding in 2020 to an undisclosed amount.