EnerVenue wins first multi-MWh order for nickel-hydrogen batteries
Victoria Shinder1 min readEnerVenue, a US start-up developing nickel-hydrogen batteries for grid storage, has secured its first commercial order at multi-megawatt-hour scale and opened the factory in China that will fill it, Energy-Storage.news reports. The company announced on 23 September that it will supply 26 containerised battery systems with a combined 11 MWh to an oilfield in northern China operated by a major Chinese producer, where they will store electricity from an on-site solar array.
The first three units are due in December 2026 and the remaining 23 in March 2027. EnerVenue's only previous installation is a 150 kWh system at Jintan in Changzhou, which pairs renewable generation with electric bus charging and has run since November 2025.
According to EnerVenue, the customer chose its aqueous metal cell technology mainly for fire safety, a hard requirement at oil and gas sites. The cells use a water-based, non-flammable electrolyte and contain no lithium, and they hold a UL 9540A certification showing no fire propagation at cell level. The chemistry descends from the nickel-hydrogen cells that powered the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, re-engineered with cheaper materials.
The company claims a design life of 30,000 cycles, up to three a day for 30 years, which it puts at four to six times the throughput of standard lithium-ion. It says the cells need no scheduled augmentation, no active cooling and, where codes allow, no fire suppression system.
What it means
An 11 MWh order is small by grid standards, but it is a paying customer choosing the chemistry for a reason lithium-ion cannot easily answer. The cycle-life and no-augmentation claims come from the manufacturer and will only be tested by years of operation; the oilfield, cycling solar daily, is a good place to watch them.