A battery manufacturer is making moves to set a foothold in Augusta.
Stryten Energy, headquartered in Alpharetta, Ga., has requested a special exception to allow the receiving, storage and processing of sulfuric acid at 3464 Mike Padgett Hwy., as required by the Augusta Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance for Heavy Industrial zones.
The site was formerly a Textron manufacturing plant. Textron moved its operations, closed the facility and put it up for sale in 2021. Ohio company Weston purchased the property in 2022.
There the company plans to use more than 74,000 of the 522,720 square foot facility on the campus to produce vanadium electrolytes for rechargeable vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFB), used for long-range renewable energy storage applications, such as for data centers, industrial power plants and solar and wind generation. Sulfuric acid is one of the key components in the production of vanadium electrolytes.
Stryten’s Augusta project is to be part of an overall expansion of its VRFB electrolyte production. According to the narrative document submitted alongside the special exception request to Augusta Planning, Stryten plans to launch its operations in two phases, the first of which is to establish a manufacturing capacity of about 2.5 million liters of vanadium electrolyte per year. Phase 2 is to entail the addition of more storage silos and production skids to the plant, increasing capacities to 12 million liters a year.
Earlier this year, Stryten Energy was one of the recipients of the Manufacture of Advanced Key Energy Infrastructure Technologies (MAKE IT) Prize, in which the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) distributed an award of $4.5 million among nine energy companies to be used for domestic clean energy manufacturing projects.
According to the DOE website Stryten was awarded the prize for its Augusta facility, “to rapidly scale the US-based production and commercialization of vanadium redox flow battery components and systems.”
The Augusta Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the special exception request during its meeting on Monday, July 1.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
