In a year marked by the rise and fall of battery companies in the U.S., one Bay Area startup thinks it can break through with a twist on a well-established technology: flow batteries. Unlike lithium-ion cells, flow batteries store liquid electrolytes in external tanks. While the system is bulkier and traditionally costlier than lithium-ion, it also offers significantly longer cycle life, the ability for long-duration energy storage, and a virtually impeccable safety profile.
Now this startup, Quino Energy, says it’s developed an electrolyte chemistry that will allow it to compete with lithium-ion on cost while retaining all the typical benefits of flow batteries. While flow batteries have already achieved relatively widespread adoption in the Chinese market, Quino is looking to India for its initial deployments. Today, the company announced that it’s raised $10 million from the Hyderabad-based sustainable energy company Atri Energy Transitions to demonstrate and scale its tech in the country.
“Obviously some Trump administration policies have weakened the business case for renewables and therefore also storage,” Eugene Beh, Quino’s founder and CEO, told me when I asked what it was like to fundraise in this environment. “But it’s actually outside the U.S., where the appetite still remains very strong.”
The deployment of battery energy storage in India lags far behind the pace of renewables adoption, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for the sector. “India does have an opportunity to leapfrog into a more flexible, resilient, and sustainable power system,” Shreyas Shende, a senior research associate at Johns Hopkins’ Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab, told me. The government appears eager to make it happen, setting ambitious targets and offering ample incentives for tech-neutral battery storage deployments, as it looks to lean into novel technologies.
“Indian policymakers have been trying to double down on the R&D and innovation landscape because they’re trying to figure out, how do you reduce dependence on these lithium ion batteries?” Shende said. China dominates the global lithium-ion market, and also has a fractious geopolitical relationship with India, So much like the U.S., India is eager to reduce its dependence on Chinese imports. “Anything that helps you move away from that would only be welcome as long as there’s cost compatibility,” he added
Beh told me that India also presents a natural market for Quino’s expansion, in large part because the key raw material for its proprietary electrolyte chemistry — a clothing dye derived from coal tar — is primarily produced in China and India. But with tariffs and other trade barriers, China poses a much more challenging environment to work in or sell from these days, making the Indian market a simpler choice.
Quino’s dye-based electrolyte is designed to be significantly cheaper than the industry standard, which relies on the element vanadium dissolved in an acidic solution. In vanadium flow batteries, the electrolyte alone can account for roughly 70% of the product’s total cost, Beh said. “We’re using exactly the same hardware as what the vanadium flow battery manufacturers are doing,” he told me minus the most expensive part. “Instead, we use our organic electrolyte in place of vanadium, which will be about one quarter of the cost.”
Like many other companies these days, Beh views data centers as a key market for Quino’s tech — not just because that’s where the money’s at, but also due to one of flow batteries’ core advantages: their extremely long cycle lives. While lithium-ion energy storage systems can only complete from 3,000 to 5,000 cycles before losing 20% or more of their capacity, with flow batteries, the number of cycles doesn’t correlate with longevity at all. That’s because their liquid-based chemistry allows them to charge and discharge without physically stressing the electrodes.
That’s a key advantage for AI data centers, which tend to have spiky usage patterns determined by the time of day and events that trigger surges in web traffic. Many baseload power sources can’t ramp quickly enough to meet spikes in demand, and gas peaker plants are expensive. That makes batteries a great option — especially those that can respond to fluctuations by cycling multiple times per day without degrading their performance.
The company hasn’t announced any partnerships with data center operators to date — though hyperscalers are certainly investing in the Indian market. First up will be getting the company’s demonstration plants online in both California and India. Quino already operates a 100-kilowatt-hour pilot facility near Buffalo, New York, and was awarded a $10 million grant from the California Energy Commission and a $5 million grant from the Department of Energy this year to deploy a larger, 5-megawatt-hour battery at a regional health care center in Southern California. Beh expects that to be operational by the end of 2027.
But its plans in India are both more ambitious and nearer-term. In partnership with Atri, the company plans to build a 150- to 200-megawatt-hour electrolyte production facility, which Beh says should come online next year. With less government funding in the mix, there’s simply less bureaucracy to navigate, he explained. Further streamlining the process is the fact that Atri owns the site where the plant will be built. “Obviously if you have a motivated site owner who’s also an investor in you, then things will go a lot faster,” Beh told me.
The goal for this facility is to enable production of a battery that’s cost-competitive with vanadium flow batteries. “That ought to enable us to enter into a virtuous cycle, where we make something cheaper than vanadium, people doing vanadium will switch to us, that drives more demand, and the cost goes down further,” Beh told me. Then, once the company scales to roughly a gigawatt-hour of annual production, he expects it will be able to offer batteries with a capital cost roughly 30% lower than lithium-ion energy storage systems.
If it achieves that target, in theory at least, the Indian market will be ready. A recent analysis estimates that the country will need 61 gigawatts of energy storage capacity by 2030 to support its goal of 500 gigawatts of clean power, rising to 97 gigawatts by 2032. “If battery prices don’t fall, I think the focus will be towards pumped hydro,” Shende told me. That’s where the vast majority of India’s energy storage comes from today. “But in case they do fall, I think battery storage will lead the way.”
The hope is that by the time Quino is producing at scale overseas, demand and investor interest will be strong enough to support a large domestic manufacturing plant as well. “In the U.S., it feels like a lot of investment attention just turned to AI,” Beh told me, explaining that investors are taking a “wait and see” approach to energy infrastructure such as Quino. But he doesn’t see that lasting. “I think this mega-trend of how we generate and use electricity is just not going away.”
Seems significant. CGEP