Second-life battery company Element Energy said it reached first close of $28 million in Series B financing.
The round was co-led by Cohort Ventures and an unnamed clean energy company. The round included additional investment from existing investors Edison International, LG Technology Ventures, Prelude Ventures, and Radar Partners.
Element also said that Matt Murphy, president and CEO of Marvell Technology, joined its board of directors.
In late November, the Department of Energy awarded $7.9 million to Element Energy and NextEra Energy Resources for a 50 MWh battery energy storage project using second-life EV batteries in ERCOT. The project would be sited at a NextEra wind farm in West Texas. The funding was part of nearly $74 million from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for 10 projects to advance technologies and processes for electric vehicle battery recycling and reuse.
Element was launched in 2019 and created a battery management system (BMS) to provide active monitoring, field diagnostics, predictive intelligence, and distributed control of large-scale battery systems. The initial deployments of Element’s BMS are intended to be used to scale the deployment of second-life batteries. Element said it then plans to offer its technology across first- and second-life energy storage and electric vehicle applications.
The company said it is planning for gigawatt-hour, grid-connected deployments in 2023 and 2024.
The Series B funding is expected to provide Element with growth capital for continued investment in assets, logistics and infrastructure. The funding will also support new hires.
Element said it will continue to work with automotive OEMs and gigafactories on additional second-life asset deployments, first-life battery energy storage systems, direct integration into electric vehicles, among other ventures.
Element said that adoption of electric vehicles is creating a large, emerging second-life battery market opportunity for the power sector to harness still-useful batteries at the end of vehicle lives. McKinsey estimated the global second-life battery market volumes available for redeployment to be more than 200 GWh by 2030, with the U.S. having an estimated 40 GWh per year of supply.
Second-life redeployment of batteries has an opportunity to offer environmental benefits through reduced emissions, lower raw material requirements and decreased energy needs, the company said.
