A Beltsville manufacturer of fast-charging, solid-state batteries has opened a new manufacturing facility to accelerate the production of batteries used in everything from smartwatches to electrified ferries.
Ion Storage Systems expects the 30,000-square-foot facility, built next to its headquarters at 12500 Baltimore Ave., to churn out 1 MWh of battery cells — enough to power the average U.S. home for a little over a month — by the end of this year and it could reach 10 MWh of battery cell production by early 2025.
The company's batteries can be used in small, personal devices such as watches and smartphones to much more power-intensive products like electric vehicles. Ion Storage Systems, which has received over $10 million in awards from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, counts the U.S. Army as its first customer and is working to deliver 1.4 million batteries for military use.
To date, Ion Storage Systems has raised over $52 million in outside investment and is looking to soon close a $15 million funding round that's being led by French building materials giant Saint-Gobain.
Spokesperson Colin Mahoney said the company has about 70 employees and is looking to double that figure in "the next few years." Ion Storage Systems, a 2022 "Inno on Fire" recipient from DC Inno, employed 15 people in June 2021.
The core of the company's ambitious growth plans rests in the technology behind Ion Storage Systems' batteries.
Unlike competing and more traditional lithium-ion batteries, Ion Storage Systems' batteries don't use graphite or other rare earth elements for production, instead relying on ceramic materials. The company said its batteries also don't require cooling systems or heavy fire barriers and are thus cheaper to manufacture.
Neil Ovadia, its vice president of supply chain, said the company designed the battery cells with an eye toward building them at scale and they don't require materials that need to be mined "in environmentally and socially challenging circumstances."
"Since day one, our objective has been to craft an advanced solid-state battery at scale, and we are thrilled with this first step in that journey," he told me in an email.
University of Maryland professor Eric Wachsman founded the company in 2012 and spun it out of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, a university-run incubator, in 2015. Ricky Hanna, a former executive director of battery operations at Apple Inc., is the company's CEO.
The company says the new plant is one of the largest facilities of its kind in the nation. Should all go according to plan, it expects to reach battery cell production of 500 MWh, enough to rival the daily output of some electric power stations, by 2028.
