Oregon-based energy storage company Powin Energy has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the District Court of New Jersey. The company claims its estimated debts are at least $300 million.
Powin formed in 2010 and operated as a global storage provider, designing everything in the system but the lithium cells. Powin had established contract manufacturing relationships throughout the United States to make the modules, racks and full systems for domestic-content purposes. Some of the largest unpaid creditors Powin listed on its bankruptcy documents are Chinese and Korean battery technology suppliers.
Just one month ago, Powin unveiled a new liquid-cooled battery energy storage system that could deliver 6.26 MWh. Powin deployed its own integrated software suite in its systems called StackOS — which included energy, battery and thermal management systems.
In the bankruptcy filings, Powin revealed its restructuring plan: spinoff its StackOS offering as a new standalone company and sell the rest of its assets. The engineering and installation side of the business was determined to be unsustainable after two large companies canceled their projects.
The company says that there are more than $2 billion of Powin utility-scale BESS deployed in the field, and they depend on the StackOS platform for their continued operation. This equates to over 17 GWh of BESS worldwide that would be unable to operate tomorrow without Powin’s software.
“Just one month ago, Powin unveiled a new liquid-cooled battery energy storage system that could deliver 6.26 MWh. Powin deployed its own integrated software suite in its systems called StackOS — which included energy, battery and thermal management systems.”
The thing I see here, like a lot of companies, they are pivoting on contracts of a specific type and NOT doing full EPC using their own [vertically integrated] manufacturing lines as “unboxed” or modular job shop automation, that is cellular and reprogrammable on the fly to produce many products from one or more stations in the facility. This concept is beginning to flesh out as economies of (scope) instead of economies of scale. Supply chains are becoming more and more important to have made in the U.S. AMM and CAM to assemble the cells in country for various chemistries and conformed battery packs for BESS units. This rage to “get it done” before subsidies step down or are curtailed is a poor game to play when one wants sustainable , tenable and untariffed supply chains for ramp up manufacturing of solar PV products and distributed energy systems. This international supply chain concept is not going to work well with overall job costs.
So, companies with projects in queues will curtail, take a wait and see attitude and wait for the Trump administration to term limit out and try again in the 2028-2029 annum. Congress would be smart to leave the IRA in place and let it sundown by 2032.