Tesla has a new publicly traded competitor for its battery-based electricity-storage business.
Eos Energy Enterprises completed its merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, on Monday, and began trading on Tuesday under the ticker EOSE. Both companies offer the ability to store power produced by renewable but unpredictable assets such as solar power so that it can be used when demand is the highest.
Tesla (ticker: TSLA), of course, is best known as an electric-vehicle giant and the most valuable car company on the planet. But CEO Elon Musk believes battery storage will be a big business, too.
“I can’t emphasize enough, I think long term, Tesla Energy will be of roughly the same size as Tesla Automotive,” said Musk on the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call in July. “In order to achieve a sustainable energy future, we have to have sustainable energy generation…So you need to have a lot of batteries to store [renewable] energy because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.”
Tesla’s battery-storage technology is based on lithium-ion batteries. Eos uses zinc-based batteries, which don’t have enough power density for EVs, but work fine for storage. Lithium-ion batteries can squeeze in, very roughly, two times as much energy as aqueous zinc.
But zinc has other advantages, according to Eos CEO Joe Mastrangelo, including better thermal-management and power-discharge properties. Perhaps most important, zinc-based batteries are cheaper than lithium-ion ones, and don’t raise concerns over conflict minerals or uncertain supplies of lithium.
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