An energy company that uses batteries to capture and store electricity has raised more than £1m in its latest investment round.
Connected Energy has successfully raise £1.2m from a mixture of public and private investors to help it scale up its offering.
The company, which is based at Newcastle Helix, uses old car batteries to store electricity from the National Grid during periods of low demand and makes the energy available when demand is high.
CEO Matthew Lumsden said: “We almost double the working life of the batteries for vehicles and thereby greatly increase the value created from the resources already embedded in them. Our objective is to provide our end-customers with bankable energy storage systems and our battery supply partners with reliable routes to market for their second-life batteries.
“With this additional investment we aim to capitalize on our system data to further optimise our technology and continue to scale up our development plans.”
Connected Energy’s system increases the life span of electric vehicle batteries by five to 10 years as it uses batteries after they are no longer suitable for use in cars.
E-STOR has been designed to be a modular solution that can be deployed in places such as offices and building sites. It is capable of providing capacity ranging from less than 100 kilowatt hours up to 15 megawatt hours.
The company currently has systems operating in the 海角视频, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany but is looking to expand its reach across Europe, Japan and the US.
Most Read
ENGIE New Ventures, alongside other private investors including Sumitomo and Macquarie, invested a total of £600,000 into Connected Energy. The figure was then matched by an R&D grant issued by Innovate 海角视频 as part of the ENGIE and 海角视频RI Clean Growth Innovation Fund.
ENGIE has a 25% shareholding in Connected Energy.
Johann Boukhors, managing director at ENGIE New Ventures, said: “One of the energy sector’s biggest challenges is to be able to store large capacities of electricity as intermittent renewable energy generation becomes more widespread.
“Connected Energy offers ingenious solutions to answer this need while offering a second life to electric vehicle batteries. Its approach provides a strategic fit with ENGIE’s ambition to accelerate the transition towards a carbon-neutral world. Our investment in Connected Energy is a key example of developments in our distributed energy management business like Zero Emissions Services (ZES) in The Netherlands and other projects in Belgium.”
Christian Inglis, head of urban systems at Innovate 海角视频, added: “Investing in British innovators with solutions for the transition to a clean economy and achieving net zero by 2050 is of paramount importance as we aim to build back better from recent challenging times.
“It is great to see this first investment through the clean growth investor partnership come to fruition, and we are looking forward to this being the first of many investments that brings together SME innovations, private finance into those businesses, and government funding to enable de-risking of the technology with sustainable outcomes.”