BDA Partners, an Asian financial advisor, has announced that LG Energy Solution (formerly LG Chem) has acquired NEC Energy Solutions in entirety.
NEC ES, which formed in the United States in 2014 after an acquisition of A123 Systems’ energy storage business, was once a significant energy storage player in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Its proprietary software suite, Aeros, was being used in Massachusetts to better allow energy storage systems to participate in the state’s SMART program.
LG ES plans to use this acquisition to expand its energy storage presence in North America and continue to offer a full range of storage services, from installation of batteries to full system solutions.
Energy Storage News has reported that NEC began going out of business in June 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to deals falling through to sell the company.
Solarman says
“Energy Storage News has reported that NEC began going out of business in June 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to deals falling through to sell the company.”
Interesting, it was NEC that signed a JV with molten battery group Ambri to develop energy storage systems for utility applications in 2019. It was later announced that NEC dropped out of the agreement and a little while later that the Bill Gates Foundation put some capital into Ambri to continue to develop their product. Now there is a clearer picture of what happened to NEC that created the failure of the JV with Ambri. The Ambri storage system is right for utility scale fast reaction frequency and voltage regulation at say local switching stations. These batteries are best if kept at around 350 degrees C and it just so happens that slamming power into and out of these batteries is the perfect way to keep the battery at its perfect operating temperature. You don’t need temperature control of the battery pack and so if it just happens to be sitting in a cabinet that is 140 degrees F in the desert summer sun, it’s not a problem. With the intrinsic high value insulation between the molten battery innards and the ambient outside temperature, the battery functions just fine in cold climates also. Basically for a large scale energy storage system, one only has to worry about the operating specifications of the actual electronics in the ESS package.
LG Chem or LG Energy Solution had better DO more than change their Moniker to help deflect past incompetence’s and some really recent failings. In 2019 LG Chem blamed ESS manufacturer AES for a fire and explosion at a utility ESS installed at the McMiken switching station in Arizona of April 2019. LG Chem said the fail was the fault for the battery pack going into thermal runaway was an AES short creating the heat to cause the thermal runaway of the LG Chem cells. Later when LG Chem started getting complaints about their residential RESUH ESS, that some units were “smoking”, did LG Chem replace about 10,000 of these systems. Now the Bolt battery pack burning problem can not necessarily be “programmed away”, but is actual cell fail in an assembled pack problem, does LG Chem become LG Energy Solutions. LG has a manufacturing line Quality Control problem and has gone to print about how LG Chem is upgrading the cell manufacturing lines and incorporating a “new” battery separator material as one of the upgrades. Personally, I would NOT go with a LG Chem, LG Energy Solutions cell derived battery pack in any ESS installed in my home.