In a commercial complex in Katy originally intended to house roughly five manufacturers, TerraFlow Energy is building up its new headquarters and manufacturing facility.
The battery manufacturer had planned to build its pilot plant in Bellville, where it is deploying 10 megawatts of batteries that can run for 10 hours, but realized it needed more space. So the company turned to the 100,000-square-foot complex at 3127 Greenbusch Road. The facility is currently in the phase of commissioning and equipment installation.
The building houses a manufacturing floor and corporate office space, along with a pilot test of TerraFlow’s one-hour prototype, which would be able to power about 10,000 homes for an hour. Built at full scale, the company’s batteries would have a life of 10 hours.
TerraFlow’s technology focuses on solving a few different problems for data centers. The batteries are able to charge and discharge energy at the same time. This means that power constantly moves through the battery, typically from the grid into a data center, and flows can be changed without affecting any data center operations, which often aim for 99.999% reliability. In theory, if the grid has an outage, the battery can continue discharging energy as a backup power source without charging for up to 10 hours without interrupting service.
Additionally, the battery smooths out the power flow to reduce any spike and surges that are common in the grid.
“When you actually look at implementing our solution, we’re probably about half the cost that you would see for lithium-ion implementation for a data center,” TerraFlow CEO John Parrella told the Houston Business Journal at a pre-opening reception for the facility. “That’s not to say if you did standalone we’d be less expensive, but when you look at the implementation at a data center campus, we end up being less expensive because we solve so many more of the problems.”
As the Katy facility ramps up, Parrella expects it will produce about 25 megawatts worth of batteries this year. But next year, he expects that’ll reach 300 MW.
Continue reading in the Houston Business Journal
By Naomi Klinge
