SolarEdge Technologies, Inc. announced on Friday it had entered into agreements to acquire a major stake in South Korea based energy storage manufacturer Kokam Co., Ltd.
If the Kokam name sounds familiar, that could be due to a high-profile large-scale energy project the company was involved with in Australia.
Back in 2015, Kokam built a 2MW lithium-ion battery system – the largest for Australia at the time – for a Powercor project in Buninyong, Victoria. The battery system was housed in a shipping container and designed to provide approximately 3,000 customers with an hour of backup power.
Backup power wasn’t the major aim of the project, which was to allow Powercor to determine if grid-scale batteries on its network would increase capacity temporarily during peak demand periods.
Kokam has been in the energy storage game for 29 years and states it has installed 232MW of large-scale storage around the world. Its lithium-ion cells and battery systems are used in a wide range of applications, from UPS’s to home solar battery storage, to submarines. Kokam’s batteries were used in Solar Impulse 2’s historic flight.
Among the company’s other claims to fame was the first commercialisation of lithium polymer battery technology.
“The acquisition of Kokam will enable us to grow our offering, adding already proven battery storage to our product portfolio,” said CEO, Chairman and Founder of SolarEdge Guy Sella. “Our technological innovation combined with Kokam’s world-class team and renowned battery storage solutions, will enable seamless integration with our current solutions, taking us a further step toward making solar installations smarter and more beneficial.”
SolarEdge says it will acquire approximately 75% of outstanding equity shares at an expected cost of $88 million. While it notes the transaction is subject to standard closing conditions, it expects to sew things up in the coming weeks. Looking ahead, it aims to scoop up remaining outstanding equity shares, with Kokam eventually becoming a wholly-owned SolarEdge subsidiary.
Solaredge is an Israeli inverter company founded around 12 years ago. It pioneered the concept of a string inverter matched with individual DC optimisers on each solar panel, enabling panel level optimisation (PLO) and monitoring. The devices provide the benefits of panel level optimisation, the cost savings of using a single string inverter and are cheaper than most microinverter systems.
Last month, Panasonic showcased its HIT S Series Smart Module, which features an integrated SolarEdge Optimizer.
About Michael Bloch
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Kokam LiNMC pouch cells were the ones that caught fire and burnt my car to the ground when it wad being inspected and registered after conversion from 20th-century banger to modern, efficient powertrain. I thought they were the best in the world (for mobile applications) until that moment.