Amara Raja Batteries Limited, Tirupati, India’s leading industrial and automotive battery manufacturer, and Gridtential Energy, Inc., Santa Clara, California, the inventor of Silicon Joule™ bipolar battery technology announce that they have entered into a formal agreement to collaborate on bipolar battery technology. Under the technology evaluation agreement, Amara Raja Batteries Limited and Gridtential Energy will assemble and test Silicon Joule™ bipolar reference batteries using Amara Raja’s active material to determine improvements in cycle life, energy density, battery efficiency, charging rates and manufacturability.
Gridtential Energy provides non-exclusive licenses for Silicon Joule™ technology, enabling manufacturing partners to easily adapt their factories to provide high performing, higher voltage 24V & 48V batteries to their customers for the hybrid-automotive, Low-Speed EV (LSEV), energy storage system (ESS) & home back-up markets – all without giga-scale capital investments. Silicon Joule™ bipolar technology enables an innovative class of advanced lead batteries with silicon at its core. It is a design driven, low-cost, high-performance, patented energy storage solution that provides improved power density, cycle life, dynamic charge acceptance and wider temperature range, with up to 40% lower weight, while retaining full lead-battery recyclability. This is all accomplished while leveraging existing technologies from mature industry supply chains – allowing rapid scaling through existing lead-battery infrastructure.
“We are pleased to be working with the talented team at Amara Raja Batteries, a progressive energy storage company on the leading edge of lead-based battery technology innovation in India,” said Gridtential Energy CEO, John Barton. “We believe that Silicon Joule advanced lead battery technology is a perfect fit for the Indian market, offering a high-performance, low-cost solution. We are excited by the opportunity to show that our advanced lead technology offers superior price-performance and confident that this will prove to be a successful platform for Amara Raja.”
Industries from automotive to grid energy storage are searching for lower-cost, sustainable power solutions to meet diverse energy needs. With Silicon Joule™ bipolar battery technology from Gridtential Energy, that combines the benefits of lead batteries with silicon-enabled, high performance characteristics, Amara Raja Batteries Limited, will be prepared to meet the global challenge.
“As an organization committed to innovation, entrepreneurialism, and pursuit of excellence, Amara Raja is always interested in exploring new ways to serve our customers with advanced products.” said Amara Raja Batteries Limited Vice-Chairman and MD, Jayadev Galla. “The unique Silicon Joule™ Bipolar technology from Gridtential holds significant potential to deliver enhanced value to our customers. And very importantly, Gridtential helps meet our environmental commitment based on lead battery recyclability greater than 99%” he added.
Samudrala Vijayanand, CEO, Amara Raja Batteries Limited commented, “We are very positive about the economic value of lead-based batteries in the Indian market and Gridtential Silicon Joule™ Bipolar technology can bridge the gap between current lead-based batteries and increasing demand for new energy storage applications. We look forward to seeing the results our teams can achieve working together on realizing more of the performance potential of lead-based batteries.”
About Gridtential Energy
Gridtential’s cutting-edge Silicon Joule™ battery architecture combines the traditional benefits of lead batteries – low cost, recyclability, and safety – with the performance and life cycle usually associated with lithium batteries. Gridtential is focused on applications ranging from hybrid automotive to grid storage, back-up power for cloud computing, material handling equipment and many others. Collaborating with a 600GWh-scale global manufacturing base and a near-100% recycling infrastructure, Gridtential and its licensing partners are planning beta and then commercial production of the Silicon Joule enabled batteries within the next two years.
About Amara Raja Batteries Limited
Amara Raja Batteries Limited is the technology leader and one of the largest manufacturers of lead-acid batteries for both industrial and automotive applications in the Indian storage battery industry. In India, Amara Raja is the preferred supplier to major telecom service providers, Telecom equipment manufacturers, the UPS sector (OEM & Replacement), Indian Railways and to the Power, Oil & Gas, among other industry segments. Amara Raja’s industrial battery brands comprise PowerStack®, AmaronVolt® and Quanta®. The Company is a leading manufacturer of automotive batteries under the brands Amaron® and PowerzoneTM, which are distributed through a large pan-India sales & service retail network.
The Company supplies automotive batteries under OE relationships to Ashok Leyland, Ford India, Honda, Hyundai, Mahindra & Mahindra, Maruti Suzuki, and Tata Motors. The Company’s Industrial and Automotive Batteries are exported to countries in the Indian Ocean Rim.