A developer of new low-cost, fire-resistant battery technology spun out of the University of Sydney is set to list on the London Stock Exchange.
The company, Gelion plc, will be the university’s first market listing anywhere when it is scheduled to begin trading on the bourse’s Alternative Investment Market on November 30. It raised £16m ($30m), giving the company a market capitalisation of £154m ($A285m), and allowing Gelion to accelerate the research and production of new storage products, primarily zinc-bromide batteries.
While the combination was originally patented in 1889, the university team led by Prof Thomas Maschmeyer created a zinc-bromide gel that they claim is a safer, longer-lasting and cheaper form of storage than the dominant lithium batteries.
“It will not catch fire. If anything, it puts it out,” Maschmeyer said, detailing some of Gelion’s advantages. “It has that high temperature operation window [up to 50C] and it’s really super safe, recyclable and has a really low environmental footprint.”
By contrast, lithium batteries are more of a fire hazard and perform less well in heat, requiring temperature controls and other engineering work, he said.
Lithium now dominates the battery market because of its relatively high energy density, making it suitable for mobile applications from smartphones to electric vehicles.
Other forms of storage, such as thermal energy or compressed air, are also vying for a share of a market that Bloomberg New Energy Finance this month predicted would grow from 17 gigawatts in 2020 to a cumulative 358GW by the decade’s end.
So far, Gelion’s total sales have totalled about $1m as it prepared demonstration products using its Endure-branded battery. The company plans to use the funds raised from listing to expand its manufacturing site in Fairfield in Sydney’s west, and to start producing batteries in India.
“I can see that Australian manufacturing actually being very substantially upgraded into potentially a gigawatt-hour a year capability,” Maschmeyer said.
Gelion’s strategy hinges largely on convincing existing makers of lead-acid batteries to retrofit their operations to use zinc-bromide instead. Such a conversion to produce a 1GW-hour annual output would cost about $US16m ($22m), compared with an estimated $US76m for a rival EOS Energy to start a zinc-bromide plant from scratch, or $US135m for a similar-sized lithium plant, he said.
Once zinc-bromide batteries can be produced at even a modest …….