![]() But Yang said in all those years, neither the lab nor the department questioned him or raised any issues. The ones it did sell, including in one instance to the U.S. UniEnergy Technologies sold a few batteries in the U.S., but not enough to meet its requirements. In an interview, Yang acknowledged that he did not do that. Yang's original license requires him to sell a certain number of batteries in the U.S., and it says those batteries must be "substantially manufactured" here. But in this case, the rules are pretty clear. an official sublicense, allowing the company to make the batteries in China.Īny company can choose to manufacture in China. In 2017, Yang formalized the relationship and granted Dalian Rongke Power Co. But over the course of the next few years, more and more of the manufacturing and assembling began to shift to Rongke Power, Chris Howard said. Ltd., along with its parent company, and he jumped at the chance to have them invest and even help manufacture the batteries.Īt first, UniEnergy Technologies did the bulk of the battery assembly in the warehouse. He said a fellow scientist connected him with a Chinese businessman named Yanhui Liu and a company called Dalian Rongke Power Co. Jay Inslee and Gary Yang of UniEnergy Technologies stand together in 2015. Imre Gyuk (left), director of energy storage research in the Office of Electricity of the Department of Energy, Washington Gov. The researchers found the batteries capable of charging and recharging for as long as 30 years. Others had made similar batteries with vanadium, but this mix was twice as powerful and did not appear to degrade the way cellphone batteries or even car batteries do. It took six years and more than 15 million taxpayer dollars for the scientists to uncover what they believed was the perfect vanadium battery recipe. It was 2006, and more than two dozen scientists began to suspect that a special mix of acid and electrolyte could hold unusual amounts of energy without degrading. The idea for this vanadium redox battery began in the basement of a government lab, three hours southeast of Seattle, called Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. To say it's frustrating is an understatement." (Now) it's deployed in China, and it's held in China. "This is technology made from taxpayer dollars," Skievaski said. The company has been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries for over a year. Joanne Skievaski is the chief financial officer of Forever Energy in Bellevue, Wash. "We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected." "It was beyond promise," said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. They were building a battery - a vanadium redox flow battery - based on a design created by two dozen U.S. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work. When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. Taxpayers spent $15 million on research to build a breakthrough battery. The former UniEnergy Technologies office in Mukilteo, Wash.
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