Redflow in “strong” position for US push, despite falling short on capital raise

Australian energy storage company Redflow has raised just under $15 million in its latest fundraising round, launched last month to leverage increasing customer interest in its zinc bromine flow battery technology and fund a push into the US market.

In an ASX announcement on Wednesday, Redflow said that the Entitlement Offer, which closed at the end of last week, raised a total of $9,693,554.09, falling short of the $17.71 million it had hoped to raise if the offer was fully subscribed.

Ultimately, Redflow received acceptances for 64,297,527 new fully paid ordinary shares, or roughly 54% of the total entitlements available for subscription.

Redflow managing director and CEO Tim Harris said the capital that was raised – which included a separate $5 million investment from US-based New Technology Capital Group – would be used to fund business development, support infrastructure, research and development and to boost further growth in the booming US battery market.

“Since our prior raising in June 2020, we have executed on our strategic objectives and achieved several important milestones, including entering the huge Californian energy storage market by signing our largest global battery sale to Anaergia,” said Harris.

“We subsequently gained further traction in the US, being named in a Request for Information by a large listed corporate as an approved supplier of flow batteries on a preliminary basis.

“Our Gen3 battery development and introduction into production continues to be a key focus and we are ramping up production to meet the increasing demand for our batteries, locally and internationally.

“Having raised nearly $15 million from the recent placement and Entitlement Offer, Redflow is in a very strong  position to execute on the significant growth opportunities we see ahead,” Harris said.

As RenewEconomy has reported, the fund-raising followed a “challenging year” during the pandemic-riven 2019/2020, a financial year that the company described as “a game of two halves”, with strong sales and deployments in the first half helping to balance out being “materially impacted” by Covid in the second.

But the company’s focus on accelerating the development of its “much simpler” and cheaper to manufacture Gen 3 10kWh zinc-bromine flow battery, or ZBM3, provided the impetus for a better financial year to come, as did a capital raise from shareholders in July 2020.

Since then, Redflow says it has achieved a number of important milestones, including signing its largest single global battery sale to Anaergia for 192 batteries to support 2MWh of energy storage in California.

That project, valued at $US1.2 million, served as the launch-pad for Redflow’s new Energy Pod Z, the company’s core multi battery module for large scale systems and has piqued interest elsewhere in the potentially huge US market.

Earlier this year, Redflow received an order for an initial 56 battery systems for 56 sites from Optus integrator EnerSys for immediate delivery, with a contract value of A$525,000, and with further orders to come. And in Europe, Redflow announced a collaboration with tech company TRUMPF to deliver scalable high-voltage grid-level energy storage deployments.

But the major new focus for international growth for the Brisbane-based company is the US, where 3.5GWh of new energy storage went online in 2020 and where the new Biden administration is expected to accelerate the transition to renewables.