ReNu Energy invests in circular battery tech scale-up Vaulta

The ASX-listed clean energy investment firm that emerged from Geodynamics' exit from geothermal projects in 2016 will be putting its weight behind fellow Brisbane-based scale-up Vaulta, which is revolutionising battery technology to meet the pressing need for a more circular economy of sustainable electrification.

ReNu Energy (ASX: RNE) has today completed the first $250,000 tranche of an investment worth up to $1 million in Vaulta, founded by Dominic Spooner in 2019 after experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to re-use batteries and their parts in the manufacturing process while working at his previous company Ember Design House.

"I wanted to create a way to make designing, prototyping, manufacturing, assembling, and disassembling battery modules easier, better and more sustainable," Spooner tells Business News Australia. 

"After research led me to the fact that only around 3 to 5 per cent of lithium batteries are properly recycled, I felt the need to look at doing that full-time."

Within a short period Vaulta developed and patented its own battery casing technology for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), manufactured locally at a facility in Windsor, Brisbane since the end of FY22.

"We make smaller, lighter, better performing battery modules that are easier to design, assemble and, importantly, disassemble at the end of their first life to better enable battery re-use and recycling," says Spooner, who was a finalist in the Brisbane Young Entrepreneur Awards in 2021 and 2022. 

This ease of assembly and disassembly, cell replacement, reusing and recycling is enabled by Vaulta's patented no-weld design, contrasting with current battery packing that involves welding, screwing and the gluing of cells, which is not only complex and expensive but leads to battery waste and increased landfill.

"We now have small scale, medium scale and multi-national customers in various applications," he says.

If ReNu ends up investing the full $1 million, it would secure a 20 per cent stake post-money stake in Vaulta. Once $500,000 has been invested on the scheduled second tranche completion date of 13 April 2023, ReNu Energy will be entitled to nominate a non-executive director to Vaulta's board.

ReNu chairman Boyd White described the investment as "simply one we could not ignore".

"It is an excellent and complementary addition to our portfolio and is structured to gain a strong foothold in a company that has developed and owns an exciting battery casing solution with a very large addressable market," White says.

"Its streamlined no-weld design is unique, enabling second life and recycling leading to reduced battery waste. Vaulta’s battery case technology works wherever batteries do – from stationary storage and electric vehicles to defence, aerospace, wearable batteries and beyond."

Spooner welcomes the investment as both parties believe batteries will have an important role in a renewable energy future.

"However, with 3,300 tons of lithium-ion battery waste per year in Australia (estimated to increase by 20 per cent annually) and 2 million tonnes predicted globally by 2030, a technology solution was needed to reduce the creation of battery waste," he says.

"ReNu Energy’s investment will enable us to scale our manufacturing capability and target further sales domestically and into the APAC and North America markets.

"We've achieved what we've wanted to achieve over the last couple of years through research and development, a couple of pilot customers and pilot revenue, and we're about to get to the end of that really early-stage process now. This kind of investment is sophisticated at a level where we can start to transfer that across to the company and become a lot more fully fledged and have economy of scale built into our product."

Having already delivered battery packs to customers in Australia, Asia and Europe, the company now has sales in the US that will start to be delivered during the current quarter.

Vaulta is currently going through International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) certifications for the product so that "basically anywhere in the world, these products are going to be ready to deploy".

"We believe Vaulta has the most circular battery design architecture in the market, and can and will compete on the global stage," Spooner claims.

"We are already winning projects away from much larger companies, because companies know that battery waste and recycling and re-use batteries is a major future issue.

"We just need to be considerate, because most of the products we make have a large component of polymers or plastics, and plastics make up a good portion of the Earth's waste. But if they're used in a reliable manner, with the right sort of composites through them, they can last longer than a battery and be reused over and over again. If you can disassemble everything, then you can recycle that plastic as well."