Certain Energy has raised £10m in a Series A round led by the British Business Bank, funding a manganese flow battery designed to store power for days rather than hours.
Il round, worth about $13.6m, will take the company’s technology towards volume production. Certain Energy plans a grid-connected MWh-class system in India, an expansion of its UK research facilities, and a supply chain capable of delivering repeatable projects.
The company spun out of Imperial College in 2017 as RFC Power and is based in London. Its flow batteries use manganese, the twelfth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, which keeps material costs low and supply chains short.
How the chemistry changes the economics
Flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes held in external tanks. Extending discharge duration means adding tank volume rather than adding cells, so the cost of longer storage rises far more slowly than it does with lithium-ion.
Certain Energy puts round-trip efficiency above 75 per cent, which the company says lets it compete economically with lithium-ion on key grid services while offering reserve capability that grids with high renewables shares need. It also claims marginal storage costs around one-tenth of comparable vanadium flow batteries, and well below lithium-ion systems.
Those numbers come from the company and haven’t been independently verified at grid scale. The MWh-class system in India is the first test of them outside the laboratory.
The Certain Energy team on the White City campus. From the left: Dr Ashkan Kavei (Head of Technology Delivery), Dr Mark Selby (Executive Chair), Dr Tim von Werne (Chief Executive) and Chris Evans (Chief Product Officer).
The curtailment bill behind the raise
Mark Selby, Certain Energy’s executive chair, framed the case around what Britain currently pays to switch renewables off. “Last year, the UK Government spent around £1.5 billion asking renewable energy providers to shut off their operations during peak production, and left unaddressed, the grid operator expects that to climb towards £8 billion a year by 2030,” he said.
The British Business Bank led the round, with participation from Centrica, Ceres Power Holdings and Temasek Trust’s Catalytic Capital for Climate and Health.
Charlotte Lawrence, managing director and head of direct equity at the British Business Bank, said the technology “has proved it can deliver longer duration storage while reducing costs”, with applications beyond the UK.
Early-stage long-duration storage remains thinly funded next to lithium-ion. A £10m Series A is modest against the scale of the constraint problem it targets, which is part of why the sector keeps missing deployment timelines.
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