Axion inks multi-year deal with global battery giant
Monday, April 13th, 2009Axion Power International is an advanced lead-acid battery company that started in Toronto but found it too expensive. As a result, it high-tailed it to Pennsylvania where the incentives were better and the cost of operation cheap. (More on that later)
These days, Axion is doing just fine. The company announced today that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Georgia-based Exide Technologies, which will become Axion’s principle OEM customer as part of a multi-year global partnership. Exide is a major battery manufacturer and recycler, and Axion has done a great job evolving the performance of lead-acid batteries. In fact, what it has done is hybridized lead-acid chemistry — the negative electrodes normally found in lead-acid batteries have been replaced with nanoporous carbon electrodes found in many advanced supercapacitors.
With this enhancement, Axion claims its battery system can survive at least three times longer than conventional lead-acid batteries designed for deep discharge cycling. It also claims higher power delivery, faster recharge time, less weight and lower maintenance. (more…)
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
