Strategic investment in leading provider of energy storage systems (ESS) and power systems across the Asia-Pacific region
- The investment marks TES's entry into energy storage systems (ESS).
- Positions TES as a leader in the second-life battery market
TES announced today its strategic investment in GenPlus, a leading Southeast Asia provider of energy storage systems (ESS) and power systems across the Asia-Pacific region. Founded in 2013, GenPlus’s hybrid ESS offer scalable turnkey solutions that use retired electric vehicle batteries for various commercial and residential energy needs in the secondary market. ESS use a network of optimally connected second-life battery cells to store electricity and are a viable power alternative for green energy plants, remote mining power and base transmit stations, among other applications.
GenPlus joining TES Group supports TES’s vision for closing the loop on battery technology and compliments TES’s recent $25 million investment in new lithium battery recycling facilities in Singapore and Grenoble, France. "Investing in technology that keeps TES at the forefront of the sustainability movement is in our DNA", said Gary Steele, TES’s chief executive officer. "Looking ahead, by 2030, there will be over six million battery packs retiring from electric vehicles each year. The global ESS processing infrastructure does not have enough capacity today to provide those batteries with the second life that true closed-loop solutions demand. GenPlus’s management team, engineering strength, and experience will help TES fill that gap".
GenPlus’s managing director, Lim Ming Chiat, said: "We are delighted to join TES as they are already an industry leader in IT lifecycle services that understands the environmental impact and global compliance. The integration of GenPlus solidifies TES’s commitment to the circular economy, ensuring that batteries are recovered and reused to address the ever-growing global demand for ESS solutions".
Safety issues, transboundary movements, hazardous waste designations, and the efficient/effective processing of batteries are challenges that are not going away anytime soon. This investment positions TES as a leader in the growing second-life battery space and, at the same time, helps our clients manage the challenges and risks that are inherent to them.
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TES company, GenPlus, wins research grants
An innovative solution by GenPlus, a TES company, has won research grant funding from the Singapore Energy Market Authority and Enterprise Singapore to enhance the mitigation of solar intermittency through the cluster Energy Storage Systems. The idea was the brainchild of Lim Ming Chiat, GenPlus Managing Director, and the co-principal investigator, Experimental Power Grid Centre of Energy Research Institute @NTU(ERI@N).
GenPlus’ “Pre-emptive and Self-adaptive Control for Photovoltaic (PV) Cluster Intermittency Mitigation” Project is one of the 5 projects underway as part of EMA’s S$25million program to develop and test energy storage solutions that help Singapore deliver its 1GWp solar power adoption beyond 2020. Grid stability due to high PV intermittency at large penetration level has always been a major concern especially for a small island country in a tropical climate that is constantly subjected to rapidly changing weather conditions and cloud movement.
Typical PV intermittency mitigation efforts are reactive in nature and focus primarily on the system-level power injection point. The GenPlus research project is unique in tackling the problem at the PV source by utilizing existing PV installations as geospatial sensors coupled with an integrated energy storage system controller. The research project possesses the potential for such an application to be deployed not just in Singapore but anywhere in the world. “It will remove the need for costly sensor deployments currently required for PV intermittency mitigation purposes as the project makes use of existing infrastructure in an innovative way and therefore would have a high degree of commercial and application potential,” said Ming Chiat. “Our target users are any existing PV installations including owners of multiple PV installation who would greatly benefit from our technology in accelerating a return on investment,” he added.
Over the next 2 years, GenPlus and its partners will utilise the grant to develop the control algorithm and the hardware to demonstrate the concept and test-bedding the technology at the actual sites. “It will support government plans to increase solar adoption and drive down the cost of PV installations and energy storage systems,” Lim concluded.