Essay by Eric Worrall
“… If Powin LLC’s present business circumstances do not improve, it is currently anticipated that a layoff will occur on or before 28 July 2025 …”
Main supplier to Australia’s most powerful big battery warns it may go out of business
Giles Parkinson
Jun 3, 2025The US-based Powin, the main supplier to the Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales, the most powerful big battery to be built in the country, has warned that it may go out of business and be forced to lay off all its staff within weeks.
Powin has filed a letter with regulatory authorities in the US state of Oregon, where it is based, warning that it may be forced to shut down by July 28, or earlier, if business conditions do not improve.
In a letter dated May 29, Powin warns that “due to unforeseen business circumstances, Powin LLC’s situation, as well as the economy generally, remain dynamic and fluid.”
The letter, signed by Powin’s VP for human resources, Scott Getman, says. “If Powin LLC’s present business circumstances do not improve, it is currently anticipated that a layoff will occur on or before 28 July 2025.
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It said: “Both Waratah Super Battery and Ulinda Park are well advanced, with 100% of Powin battery packs installed and commissioning activities progressing. Waratah Super Battery currently has around 240 MW available and is progressing through hold point testing.
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“Akaysha has mobilised its deep in-house engineering, delivery, asset management, and market operations teams to mitigate any risks to seamless project delivery.
Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/main-supplier-to-australias-most-powerful-big-battery-warns-it-may-go-out-of-business/
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Powin is the main supplier for the big battery which is supposed to replace Eraring Coal Plant. The NSW government last year agreed to pay a billion dollars to Eraring to stay open until 2027, to stabilise the New South Wales state grid.
There were early warning signs of Powin’s precarious financial situation, which somehow appear to have been overlooked during the Waratah project’s due diligence. It took me 2 minutes of googling to discover that in 2023 a Chinese supplier took Powin to court for allegedly not paying their bills.
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Although the company raised US$200 million financing through a credit facility with influential US investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (KKR) as recently as Q3 of last year, Powin cited “unforeseen business circumstances” impacting its performance in its notice letter last week.
Late last year, one of Powin’s battery suppliers, CATL, filed a complaint in a US court for alleged non-payment for battery cells supplied during 2023. The Chinese battery manufacturer claimed the US integrator had not paid for two shipments of cells, worth CNY310 million (US$44 million).
Though the company has pushed into international markets including Australia, Europe and Latin America, Powin’s announcement comes amid a backdrop of uncertainty for the US battery storage industry, driven by US federal policy announcements including tariffs and the possible repeal of tax credit incentives for clean energy manufacturing and deployment via the budget reconciliation bill.
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Read more: https://www.energy-storage.news/powin-could-cease-operations-by-end-of-july-if-present-business-circumstances-do-not-improve/
Despite this apparent cashflow difficulty Powin was until recently able to secure access to serious loans. In October 2024, Powin announced they had secured a $200 million “revolving credit facility” from investment giant KKR. Perhaps KKR were expecting Powin’s fortunes to improve after the November 2024 election.
Green energy pundits are already busy blaming Trump’s tariffs for Powin’s difficulties. My opinion is, given the economic turmoil of the last five years, perhaps Powin should have paid more attention to managing the risk of signing fixed price procurement and delivery contracts.
There seem to be hints that Powin might have secured federal grants and moneys, but I didn’t find anything definitive. Powin was certainly named in Biden era documents as a strategic green energy provider. If anyone has the patience to go dumpster diving through Powin public company statements and Biden administration online records, please post anything you find in comments.
The Waratah Super Battery when completed will have a capacity of 1680MWh – equivalent to just over half an hour of Eraring Coal Plant output when fully charged. Given wind droughts covering the entire continent of Australia have occurred at least twice in the last five years, only the engineering challenged could believe a battery of this capacity is an adequate replacement for a plant capable of delivering a continuous 2880MW.
Even though Waratah Super Battery spokespeople are claiming “100% of Powin battery packs” have been installed, it must be a deeply uncomfortable situation to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a product which is meant to serve as the backbone of an entire state’s electricity grid, only to see the supplier start cease trading proceedings. You can’t pursue a warranty claim against a company which no longer exists. Having said that, Akaysha Energy, which is managing the Waratah battery project, has promised to mobilise “… its deep in-house engineering, delivery, asset management, and market operations teams to mitigate any risks to seamless project delivery.”
As Ozzy Man might ask “Destination F’d?”
Buy them while they’re hot.
Before they’re on fire? 😅🤣😂
I have some old carbon zinc cells they can have, but they have to pay postage and shipping.
And hazmat fees. And insurance.
Carbon zinc batteries do not have material data safety sheets listing any hazards.
Insurance? Ok. Mail is often lost, but since I would send them at 0 cost, insurance seems a waste.
But . . . , but . . . they contain CARBON! How dangerous is that? Think of the global warming potential!
/humour off
Childhood-swallowing danger?
At that rate they’ll only need another 23 Waratah Super Battery sized sites to potentially replace the ONE COAL STATION power potential (and billions of dedicated solar panels and wind turbines to recharge it daily)
No, 47, it’s only half an hour.
And what exactly are they going to “charge” those batteries with when there is no wind on a cloudy day ??
Coal fired electricity ??
I love it when my eyes play tricks on me.
I thought you said coal fried electricity.
And that would only be for an inadequate period of time, not to mention the gigantic assumption that there would be enough “excess” power to charge them in between uses.
That’s why the “Dedicated” Billions of Solar Panels and Wind Turbines
Batteries are DC voltage, whereas almost every “grid” in the world is based on AC voltage.
Due to DC-AC conversions losses (perhaps up to 10% for very high amperage circuits) and the fact that most batteries experience shorter life-cycle capability if drawn down below about 15% depth-of-discharge, battery nameplate capacity never equates to delivered capacity.
Ooops . . . my mistake in my last sentence . . . I should have stated “. . . experience shorter life-cycle capability if drawn down below about
15%85% depth-of-discharge, . . .”, meaning that life-cycle damage occurs when a battery has very little charge left.“Waratah Super Battery currently has around 240 MW available and is progressing through hold point testing.”
What exactly does that mean? is that a typo, peak power available, or KW hours?
My typo should be MW hours.
WM is voltage times current and does not reflect capacity, which you know to be MW hours.
If the batteries can last 0.5 hours, then the capacity is 120 MW-hr.
I have no idea what they mean by hold point testing. I have never heard that term before in the past half century of studying batteries, cells, all those electro-chemical energy sources.
It apparently has something to do with batteries backing up WTG and WV arrays and how fast those can achieve a threshold power output.
Hold point testing refers to a mandatory verification step in a process where work cannot proceed until an inspection or approval is granted. It is commonly used in construction, manufacturing, and quality assurance to ensure compliance with standards before moving forward.
Having said that, Akaysha Energy, which is managing the Waratah battery project, has promised to mobilise “… its deep in-house engineering, delivery, asset management, and market operations teams to mitigate any risks to seamless project delivery.”
Is this free or will there be some kind of fee involved? /sarc
So Waratah’s big bad grid battery can replace 1/2 hour worth of Eraring coal based generation. Decision makers in Australia appear to be very innumerate. And despite their foolishness, their Oregon battery supplier is going bankrupt.
Won’t end well. I used to have UK and Texas ERCOT on my short list of likely future grid disasters. Now adding Eastern Australia.
Germany likely escapes because of Norway grid buffer, and California likely escapes because of BPA grid imports.
Eastern Australia is ground zero for this insanity. I get the sense that it is important to green advocates worldwide that Australia achieve the net zero transition. If renewables can’t be made to work in sun drenched Australia, they won’t work anywhere.
SunRayce… same cars racing across the outback after 30 years of R&D
SunRayce… same cars racing across the outback after 40 years of R&D by USA’s top engineering college brands.
Net zero? Too much CO2 in the atmosphere? Just eliminate more people who breathe it out. Restore the “natural balance”.
Has everybody in power been afflicted with folie à plusiers? (Collective madness, but the French sounds better).
I know Svante Arrhenius was a board member for the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene, (which apparently wasn’t a charity to supply soap to other races), and he had interesting ideas about restricting the number of CO2 exhalers, but that was then, and this is now.
On the other hand, maybe if the people in power had taken note of his experiments, and subjected all children to “electricity”, they might have become smart enough to reject Arrhenius’ unsupported speculations about the warming properties of CO2.
Here –
Must be true – he won a Nobel Prize!
Net zero? Electrifying children to make them bigger and smarter? Adding CO2 to air makes it hotter?
Some people will believe anything.
“(which apparently wasn’t a charity to supply soap to other races)”
Ok that was funny.
Rud, “very innumerate” is a colossal understatement. No-one seems to be able to comprehend that when the coal is shut down 3 banks of 5 hour (I’m being generous) batteries will be required to get through 1 night let alone 10 nights like we experienced at this time last year (unless of course we increase gas fired generation by a factor of about 20 and we have only 1 calm night before it gets windy again).
I notice from Google Earth there are 2 large coal exporting facilities near Waratah. I wonder if that negates whatever effect the batteries have on emissions.
The Norwegians are wanting to renegotiate their deals with the UK and Germany following dismay at their closure of coal and nuclear generation respectively.
The Norwegian hydro system only has a small 1.4GW of pumped storage. The other approximately 32GW is not pumped – when the water runs out it is not available for domestic use.
https://watt-logic.com2025/02/21/norway-turning-away-from-electricity-interconnection/
They can make a really big warm fire.
Just need to connect that heat to a turbine. But it still won’t provide power for long, and still can’t replace a coal fired plant.
Are we worrying unnecessarily?
Since we have now pretty much engineered the means to control the weather through our $trillions spend on Net Zero CO2 emissions, why can’t we just arrange for wind droughts to happen between midnight and 5am when most households are asleep in their beds, and aren’t in need of electricity?
(Of course they’d have been advised to charge up their EVs before midnight).
Powin has projects in Canada as well.
https://www.energy-storage.news/powin-energy-to-deliver-canadas-largest-energy-storage-rollout-at-52-8mwh/
Oops, “had” not has.
“big battery which is supposed to replace Eraring Coal Plant”
Error.. a battery cannot “replace” a power station, because a battery produces zero power of its own.
Story tip – Guess How Much D.C. Dems Wasted on Streetcars They’re Now Ditching? – PJ Media
“The costly D.C. streetcar system, only 2.2 miles long, is going into the trash heap 15 years after the track was first laid and only a decade into operations.”
Is there a success story somewhere to offset all the bad news?
May the whole “green energy” (NOT) grift collapse like a house of cards in a hurricane.
“Green energy pundits are already busy blaming Trump’s tariffs for Powin’s difficulties.”
You don’t have to be a GE pundit to work that out. Powin is just the middle man here. The batteries actually come from Eve Energy, in China. If involving Powin means a 30% cut to Trump, then bye bye US middle man. The batteries will still arrive.
So what you are saying is the Aussie Albanese government or green energy providers receiving Aussie tax payer money have squandered that money on a chain of useless middle men?
Normally when a company deliberately engages useless middlemen, it is because the executives making the purchasing decision are incompetent, or they expect the middlemen to skim the contract, to give them illegal kickbacks, but I’m sure that cannot be the explanation in this case, right?
And of course there is the issue of possible non payment. The batteries will still arrive – assuming Eve Energy has received payment for previous orders. This may not be a totally safe assumption, given Powin’s previous payment dispute with the Chinese.
Yep.
After Powin’s public admission that they’re struggling, all transactions now will be ‘POO’.
(Payment On Order)
Eric,
“So what you are saying is the Aussie Albanese government or green energy providers receiving Aussie tax payer money have squandered that money on a chain of useless middle men?”
Nothing to do with Albanese. This is an NSW government purchase, and from the timimg, would be the previous conservative government.
We don’t know what the intermediary services of Powin cost, but they may have had a legitimate risk absorbing role. It seems Eve was an early stage company. What we do know is that in the days of Trump, the Chinese company is a better risk than the US one.
If Powin ceases business, warranty ceases, as that is provided by them.
No. In fact NSW contracted with Akaysha Energy, who subconyracted to Powin. Akaysha say that they will see the contract is honored, as I expect they are obliged to.
The battery is half the cost of a grid scale battery storage project. Enclosure, over current protection, switch gear, inter-connecting, fire suppression and much more is the other half.
The NSW government actually contracted with Akaysha Energy. Povin’s job was to supply the battery, and that seems to be complete.
“Akaysha Energy was appointed by Energy Corporation of NSW to develop the battery.
The Waratah Super Battery has reached mechanical completion and will be fully operating later this year.
Project partners include: Powin for battery hardware and software, Consolidated Power Projects (CPP) for engineering, procurement and construction, EKS (now part of Hitachi Energy) for power conversion systems and Wilson Transformer Company for power transformers.”
Nick,
Was this battery assembled with cells bought from China? It seems to have been installed by a local Australian company, using Japanese electronics and locally built transformers.
Maybe a customer might have saved money having the battery assembled in China, and shipped direct. They are quite heavy.
Possibly Powin is unprofitable without dependable “Investment Tax Credits”, and other Government assistance. Not exactly the finest example of American exceptionalism.
“The batteries will still arrive.”
A pointless and totally unnecessary waste of taxpayer money. !
And lets just ignore the massive pollution in China to make these stupid things.
Ignoring environmental damage is what leftists environmentalist do.
The battery is half the cost of a grid scale battery storage project. Enclosure, over current protection, switch gear, inter-connecting, fire suppression and much more is the other half.
Building “Golden Parachutes” for top executives at subsidy dependent organizations and paying bills typically create conflict. Good management requires establishing proper priorities.
More good news. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Remove all wind and solar from the grid.
May was not such a productive month for wind farms connected to Australia’s major grid covering the states of Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania (the states of Western Australia and Northern Territory have separate grids due to distance).
All part of the energy transition. Transitioning from “all the time” to “mostly” to “sometimes” to “mostly not at all”, when asking if using the switch would turn the lights on.
I wish I was joking.
When I was kid, we got a clip around the ear if we walked out of a room and left the light on.
Because it would stay on permanently unless someone turned it off at the switch.
So maybe it’s “progress” that kids don’t cop it these days for leaving a light on, because it’s a fair bet that every light in the house will be turned off as soon as the wind dies down?.
Self regulating lights. Good idea – I believe the wind slows down at night, so you wouldn’t need light switches. During the day, if the sun was bright, you wouldn’t notice the lights were on, so there would be no point in turning them off. Plenty of spare electricity during the day when the wind blows most.
Another group to benefit would be pious Orthodox Jews, who would not have to worry about employing a person to turn on lights during Shabbat, nor purchasing a Kosher switch, with its consequent religious disputation.
Win-win. Same situation with solar – self regulating nighttime lights!
You are a definite genius!
“Another group to benefit would be pious Orthodox Jews, who would not have to worry about employing a person to turn on lights during Shabbat,”
THE SHABBOS GOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIige41_h1Q
enjoy
Powin should have asked the good folk here at Watts Up With That, for several years, we’ve been saying batteries are not the answer.
Australia is experiencing unusually cold weather at the moment.
It seems that the nitwits in charge think batteries generate electricity and after discharge don’t need recharge which falls foul of the same intermittency problem they are supposed to solve.
A quick search found this;
The Waratah Super Battery is a 850MW and 1680 MWh battery.
“a battery energy storage system located at the former Munmorah coal-fired power station that is can provide a guaranteed continuous active power capacity of at least 700 MW and a guaranteed useable energy storage capacity of at least 1400 megawatt-hours”
To me that means that this battery will be kept fully charged to cover emergencies. That is the only way that it can provide “guaranteed” capacity.
It will not be able to store surplus if it is kept fully charged. Seems like they are over guaranteeing.
It would require two of these plants to meet the claimed guarantees.
An article in reneweconomy states that it will be used daily and charged by wind and solar.
It seems that these batteries have magical properties or their proponents are very confused.
I found no mention or which battery technology is used.
From the reneweconomy.com.au website extract given in the above article:
“The US-based Powin, the main supplier to the Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales, the most powerful big battery to be built in the country, has warned that it may go out of business and be forced to lay off all its staff within weeks.”
Hmmmm . . . looks like New South Wales went with the low-ball quote from all US companies offering grid-scale battery storage.
In comparison, for Q3 2024, Tesla saw an ~75% increase year-over-year in large battery sales
Meanwhile:
“ ‘In a layoff notice, the company told state and local officials that 96 employees in Oregon and 149 remote workers — a total of 245 — could lose their jobs.
“If Powin LLC’s present business circumstances do not improve, it is currently anticipated that a layoff will occur on or before July 28, 2025,’ the company said.
“It’s a shocking fall for a company that had grown into one of the world’s largest grid-scale battery energy storage system suppliers, drawing investment of at least $235 million since private equity firms took a controlling interest in early 2021.
“The company, in its notice, cited ‘unforeseen business circumstances,’ adding that its situation, ‘as well as the economy generally, remain dynamic and fluid.’
“Powin flourished by marrying Chinese manufactured lithium-ion battery cells with proprietary system technology to serve a growing market for grid-scale storage. It has supplied projects around the world, but the U.S. is its most important market.”
— https://www.kgw.com/article/money/business/powin-portland-energy-company-faces-shutdown/283-7c89783f-8326-4283-adb8-53e7d8e7218d
The phrase “unforeseen business circumstances” covers a lot of possibilities, including outright mismanagement, over-leveraging, embezzlement and other forms of corporate corruption.
Caveat emptor (after the fact).
Here’s the climate changer’s problem writ large even in a Mediterranean climate like South Australia-
Negative demand: The new grid reality in a state where half of all homes have rooftop solar | RenewEconomy
and don’t forget these big expensive suckers to try and hang it all together before a cloudy day or the sun goes down-
SA syncons deliver big savings as they set wind free and cut gas output | RenewEconomy
and let’s not get too hasty here folks with the less than desirable-
Diesel generators to be switched back on during South Australian peak demand periods – ABC News