Australia first lithium-ion battery power at Tomago

Australia’s first lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility will soon start operating at Tomago after a successful pilot program.

Energy Renaissance’s pilot program subbed ‘Apollo’, backed by the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre, developed and tested the pilot lithium-ion battery plant which is successfully producing up to 4 megawatt hours of battery power per month.

Energy Renaissance formed in 2015, and aim to offer products that are as close to 100 percent Australian content as possible, with the company already at 92 percent.

With the pilot project complete, Energy Renaissance can now move into a custom designed 4,500 square-metre manufacturing facility, also at Tomago.

Named ‘Renaissance One’ the gigafactory will house over 700 employees to manufacture, sell and support the high-performance lithium-ion batteries.

The facility will initially produce up to 300 Mega-watt hours of energy storage annually, scaling to 5.3 Gigawatt Hours, or 5.3 billion watts, of energy storage per year via its ground-breaking battery system.

Brian Craighead, Development Director and Founder of Energy Renaissance said just a few years ago they were told manufacturing these batteries in Australia would be impossible.

“Today, in the shadow of our soon-to-becompleted Renaissance One facility I can tell you that it is absolutely possible to manufacture in Australia,

“With the support of organisations such as AMGC and our partners, we have been able to develop a worldleading lithium-ion battery for domestic and export use and soon, we hope to expand the impact of this program to add value to Australia’s abundant raw materials by embarking on cell manufacture,” said Brian Craighead.

The collaborative project, worth $1.47 million, was supported through a $525,072 co-investment administered by AMGC and matched by Energy Renaissance, with project partners contributing a further $427,681. Project participants include CSIRO, ATB Morton and Maccor. Energy Renaissance forecast $95.7M in revenue directly related to this project (excluding the larger Renaissance One facility) over the next 5 years.

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