Aquion Energy
| Industry | Electronics |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Lawrenceville |
|
Key people
|
CEO Scott Pearson CTO Jay Whitacre |
| Products | Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI) battery |
| Website | aquionenergy.com |
Aquion Energy was a Pittsburgh-based company that manufactured sodium ion batteries (salt water batteries) and electricity storage systems.
The company claimed to provide a low-cost way to store large amounts of energy (e.g. for an electricity grid) through thousands of battery cycles, and a non-toxic end product made from widely available material inputs and which operates safely and reliably across a wide range of temperatures and operating environments.
The company was founded in 2008 by Jay F. Whitacre, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Ted Wiley. They set up research and development offices in Lawrenceville, where it produced pilot-stage batteries. Whitacre received a BA in physics from Oberlin College and a PhD in materials science from the University of Michigan. He held positions at California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, studying energy-related topics ranging from fundamental materials function to systems engineering. In 2007 he accepted a professorship at Carnegie Mellon.
The company raised funding from Kleiner Perkins, Foundation Capital, Bill Gates, Nick and Jobey Pritzker, Bright Capital and Advanced Technology Ventures, among others.
In 2011, an individual battery stack was promoted to store 1.5 kWh, a pallet-sized unit 180 kWh. The battery cannot overheat. The company expected its products to last many charge/discharge cycles, twice as long as a lead-acid battery. Costs were claimed to be about the same as with lead-acid.
In October 2014 they announced a new generation with a single stack reaching 2.4 kWh and a multi-stack module holding 25.5 kWh.
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