In a vivid, surprisingly quiet manufacturing facility in western Eire, staff are placing the ending touches to a battery pack so giant they want a step ladder to achieve the highest.
Weighing in at round 1.5 tonnes, the corporate says it’s the largest particular person pack on the electrical automobile market immediately, delivering virtually 300 kilowatt hours of energy.
As soon as fitted into its white steel casing, this €150,000 pack — and 6 different similar ones, every containing 16,128 particular person cells which are a little bit longer and fatter than AA batteries — is destined for an Australian mine truck. That’s simply one of many autos that Irish firm Xerotech is supplying as mining, development and different industries search to chop their carbon emissions.
EV passenger automotive adoption is accelerating however chief govt Barry Flannery stated Xerotech was concentrating on “the bigger-picture story of how does all this different stuff develop into electrical?”
It’s a area of interest market, promoting “hundreds of thousands of models at finest” a yr globally, however with sturdy progress forecast over the approaching decade.
It is usually a brand new business for Eire, which is residence to giant tech and chip corporations however just one different battery pack agency, Li-Gen, which provides renewable power storage, golf carts, camper vans, and a few forklift vehicles.
Most battery cells are made in China and elsewhere in Asia and Xerotech’s opponents are primarily within the US. The main European battery agency is Sweden’s Northvolt, which is planning a $20bn IPO.
However 32-year-old Flannery, who based Xerotech as a PhD pupil from his storage in Galway on Eire’s Atlantic coast in 2015, noticed a niche available in the market.
Excessive volumes make for economies of scale in electrical automotive batteries, however on the subject of “off-highway autos” akin to vehicles, diggers and heavy tools “there are tons of of various automobile platforms, architectures, shapes, sizes — going from a system that wants a 5 kWh battery to a 5,000 kWh battery and every part in between,” Flannery stated.
His answer was battery packs that may be stacked inside the vast majority of OHVs, so “you don’t have a thousand totally different manufacturing traces, a thousand totally different product variations”, and that may be bought “in volumes as little as one”.
Automobile producers really feel “they’ve received a bespoke go well with, nevertheless it’s off the shelf, mainly”, he stated.
Nonetheless, some discovered it a tough business. Proterra of the US, an electrical bus maker that moved into OHV batteries and floated in 2021, filed for chapter final yr after struggling to scale up totally different merchandise concurrently. It has been purchased by Swedish automobile maker Volvo. Electrical truck start-up Nikola purchased battery maker Romeo Energy in 2022 however liquidated it lower than a yr later, amid excessive commodities costs and hard capital market circumstances.
There are different examples of consolidation. Komatsu, a Japanese tools producer, has taken over American Battery Options; US equipment and heavy tools producer John Deere final yr purchased battery maker Kreisel and Caterpillar has invested in battery pack maker Lithos.
“Many [companies] have struggled and quite a lot of them have failed,” Flannery stated. “There’s a serious arms race on this business proper now.”
Assembly the large variations in battery pack dimension necessities for various OHVs is one problem for the business. Security, particularly fireplace, is the opposite.
Xerotech says its battery packs comprise an insulating foam that stops fireplace from spreading and they are often pierced with out blowing up. It has additionally developed battery security know-how for the European House Company.
The corporate produces tons of of batteries a yr, of vastly totally different sizes, and views Proterra, American Battery and Lithos as amongst its direct opponents in an off-road market with 30 or so world battery pack producers.
It retains prices down by making the equipment to assemble the packs itself. With some 40 prospects Xerotech had “800 per cent income progress final yr and we’re on observe for 250 per cent once more this yr,” stated Andrew Crose, chief business officer.
“Not less than for the following 5 years, it’s not loopy to have 2x progress year-on-year,” Flannery stated, one thing Crose stated would put the enterprise on a “unicorn trajectory” of a $1bn plus valuation.
The corporate may break even by the top of 2026 and Flannery stated it had raised “simply shy of $100mn” with no enterprise capital funding.
The European Funding Financial institution has put in €30mn; the remaining has been raised from household places of work in Eire, he stated. “In California, I’d have simply raised a billion at this stage.”
Takeover presents come “as soon as a month,” stated Flannery, who’s increasing right into a second website in Galway subsequent yr. He’s additionally opening a gross sales assist workplace within the US this yr and planning a producing plant within the US in 2026. Whereas a year-and-a-half in the past, Europe accounted for 60 per cent of gross sales, now the US and Canada make up 60 per cent, with Europe on 30 per cent and Australia and Asia with 10 per cent.
Flannery, who studied utilized physics earlier than a PhD in mechanical engineering that he completed in a yr to have the ability to give attention to Xerotech, stated the off-road market was “one of the thrilling fields of electrical autos”.
From an engineering perspective, “EV is boring — it’s all carried out, it’s all solved,” he stated. “So that is the place all the brand new engineering is. What does a completely electrical practice seem like? What does a completely electrical haul truck seem like?”
