Origins of the Modern Battery Storage Business

Welcome to our second season! Over the next eight episodes, we’ll hear from people who’ve scaled new clean energy technologies, built market-changing companies from scratch, and managed big firms in the face of competitive threats.

In this episode, a pioneer in storage who helped prove out the business case for putting big batteries on the grid: John Zahurancik.

John is the chief operating officer of a company called Fluence, a storage supergroup made up of teams from AES and Siemens. He and his co-founder Chris Shelton were some of the earliest visionaries in the grid-scale storage industry.

“I think at the beginning we faced every doubt, if you will. If there was a doubt to be had, it was mentioned to us. So I think it's referred to as the Holy Grail because no one expects that you'll ever actually find it,” says Zahurancik.

Today, lithium-ion batteries on the grid are surging. Just last year, the global battery market grew 140%, according to the research firm Wood Mackenzie. It’ll double in 2019. And it’ll triple in 2020.

Back in 2006, there were a lot of skeptics. But John saw something that the skeptics didn’t — lithium-ion batteries, when scaled, had the potential to completely reshape the grid.

Resources:

The first storage supergroup has arrived

Long before Tesla, there was AES