Flux Power stepping into solar and grid storage market

Flux Power stepping into solar grid storage marketFlux Power, a fast-growing energy storage company, is moving more aggressively into the grid storage and solar market.

The California company recently announced a new partnership with Terra Steward, an energy independence and sustainable living product supplier.

Terra will market Flux battery systems to home and business owners looking for more comprehensive solar installations that come with battery back up and energy storage options.

“There is going to be huge demand from the solar industry,” said Flux CEO Chris Anthony.

As the industry grows, it’s also evolving and events like Hurricane Sandy have alerted home and business owners to the virtues of energy storage systems paired with their distributed solar generation capacity.

The smarter the system, the better, because it will increase flexibility and possibly enable system owners to island themselves so they can continue to have and use power even if the grid it out.

Anthony said he believes Flux Power is uniquely positioned for major growth in the solar and grid storage industries.

On top of producing long-lasting lithium-based battery systems, Flux makes its energy storage system intelligent and communicative. Users can check in on the health of every individual battery cell in their systems through Flux software.

That’s valuable information, especially for clients like military bases and server farms that can’t afford any outage at all. He said Flux primarily produces larger-scale battery systems in the 100- to 200-amp hour range. “That makes us most deployable to large electric vehicles and grid storage,” Anthony said.

Anthony found his way to the energy storage world from an extensive background as an entrepreneur. From finance to boats to lightweight synthetic materials, he ended up working toward building an electric car.

In his attempts to build an efficient vehicle for Aptera, Anthony discovered “black hole” in the battery world. All the battery companies they talked to were selling cells. “People don’t want to buy a battery cell,” Anthony said. “They want to buy a battery system.”

So, he established a battery business in 2009 and has so far shipped more the $8.5 million worth of product. “The failure of Aptera was never building a product,” Anthony said. “I wanted to push toward a cash-flow positive situation right away.” Anthony said he expects the partnership with Terra Steward to accelerate the company’s grid storage market growth.