EnerVenue Starts High-Volume Production of Nickel-Hydrogen Aqueous Metal Cells in China

Energy storage developer EnerVenue has begun manufacturing its Aqueous Metal Cell (AMC) at a facility in Changzhou, China — a water-based nickel-hydrogen battery chemistry the company claims no other firm currently produces at volume. Construction at the Wujin site started in April, and the first fully conforming cell rolled off the line in late September. Because no comparable production line exists elsewhere, EnerVenue reports that it engineered and assembled every machine on the line in-house.

Phase 1 of the plant is rated for 250 MWh of annual output, with plans to reach 1 GWh in 2027 and multi-gigawatt-hour scale by 2028. The roughly 20,000-square-meter building is designed to accommodate an identically sized second phase, and the line is expected to reach full rate during November. At full automation, the company targets about 300 fourth-generation cells per day. Automated guided vehicles shuttle cells between stations, a vision-guided stacking machine builds the electrode stack, and each cell is wound in fiberglass under tension regulated from the inside out. Every unit must clear 41 quality checks spread across 11 test and measurement stations covering weld integrity, leak tightness and performance.

The AMC builds on nickel-hydrogen chemistry, the same technology that powered the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station for decades, which EnerVenue says it has re-engineered around low-cost materials. The company rates the cell for 30,000 cycles — equivalent to as many as three per day over 30 years — without scheduled augmentation, and notes it contains neither lithium nor rare earths. The water-based electrolyte is non-flammable, and EnerVenue asserts there is no thermal runaway fire risk. “While thermal runaway is generally defined as a self-accelerating sequence of exothermic reactions, the AMC chemistry does not produce the same progression of events that leads to ignition, fire, explosion, or propagation to adjacent cells,” said Chief Technology Officer Majid Keshavarz.

The line will supply four products: a 30 kWh Energy Core for telecom and distributed-site UPS, a 108 kWh Energy Cube for in-building and data center UPS, a 150 kWh Energy Rack for commercial, industrial and grid-connected duty, and the containerized Energy Prism spanning 600 kWh to 1 MWh. EnerVenue disclosed its first signed multi-MWh commercial order on September 23 — 26 Energy Prism containers totaling 11 MWh for an oilfield operator in northern China that is pairing on-site generation with storage — with initial shipments due in December. A fourth-generation AMC deployment has been running with Towngas at Jintan in Changzhou since November 2025, combining on-site renewables with electric bus charging, and cells have already gone to customers in the US, Belgium and Saudi Arabia, including PowerSecure, Radiance Energy and Western Australian utility Horizon Power. The Changzhou line is backed by the $300-million Series B extension led by Full Vision Capital announced in March 2026. “Anyone can make one good vessel. The job is making the ten-thousandth one exactly the same,” said TJ Hua, EnerVenue’s Head of Production.