EnerVenue opens production line for its nickel-hydrogen Aqueous Metal Cell in China
EV Engineering News
Posted October 2, 2026 by Chris Ruoff & filed under Newswire, The Tech.
Energy storage company EnerVenue has started production of its Aqueous Metal Cell (AMC), a water-based nickel-hydrogen battery, at its Wujin site in Changzhou, China. The company says the line is the first high-volume AMC line built anywhere. Ground was broken in April, and the first conforming cell came off the line in late September.
Phase 1 is rated at 250 MWh of annual capacity, and EnerVenue plans to raise that to 1 GWh in 2027, and to multi-gigawatt-hour scale by 2028. The line is set to ramp to full rate through November, and at full automation it is designed to produce about 300 fourth-generation cells a day. The plant covers around 20,000 square meters, and the building has provision for a second phase of the same size.
No other company builds an AMC, EnerVenue says, so it designed and built every machine on the line itself. Automated guided vehicles move cells between stations, a stacking machine assembles the electrode stack under a vision system that learns from what it sees, and each cell is wound in fiberglass under tension controlled from the inside out. Every cell passes 41 quality checks across 11 test and measure stations covering weld integrity, leak tightness and performance.
The AMC is built on nickel-hydrogen chemistry, which powered the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station for decades. EnerVenue says it re-engineered the chemistry with low-cost materials and designed the cell for 30,000 cycles, up to three a day for 30 years, without scheduled augmentation. The cell uses no lithium or rare earths.
The electrolyte is water-based and non-flammable, and the cell carries no risk of fire from thermal runaway, according to EnerVenue. “While thermal runaway is generally defined as a self-accelerating sequence of exothermic reactions, the AMC chemistry does not produce the same progression of events that leads to ignition, fire, explosion, or propagation to adjacent cells,” said Majid Keshavarz, EnerVenue’s Chief Technology Officer.
The line supplies cells for four products. The 30 kWh Energy Core is for UPS at telecom and other distributed sites, and the 108 kWh Energy Cube is for in-building and data center UPS. The 150 kWh Energy Rack is for commercial, industrial and grid-connected duty, and the containerized Energy Prism ranges from 600 kWh to 1 MWh.
EnerVenue announced its first signed multi-MWh commercial order on September 23: 26 Energy Prism containers totaling 11 MWh for an oilfield company in northern China, pairing on-site generation with storage. The first containers are scheduled to ship in December.
The first commissioned deployment of the fourth-generation AMC has been operating with Towngas at Jintan in Changzhou since November 2025, integrating on-site renewable generation with electric bus charging. Cells have also shipped to customers in the US, Belgium and Saudi Arabia, and EnerVenue’s customers include PowerSecure in the US, Radiance Energy in Canada and Western Australian utility Horizon Power.
The Changzhou line is funded by the $300 million Series B extension led by Full Vision Capital that EnerVenue announced in March 2026.
“Anyone can make one good vessel. The job is making the ten-thousandth one exactly the same,” said TJ Hua, EnerVenue’s Head of Production.
Source: EnerVenue
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