Ambrosia Energy has begun work on a battery factory near Austin, Texas, with annual capacity of 10 gigawatt hours, enough, the company says, to build about 300 megawatts of power plants a year at its field sites. The 150,000 square foot plant is expected to reach full production in two to three years. Ambrosia, founded by the former heads of satellite startup Swarm, which was sold to SpaceX, builds off grid solar and battery plants for data centers, with panels charging batteries by day and discharging overnight to keep a site running around the clock.
Its first commercial plant, in West Texas, pairs 300 megawatts of solar with 660 megawatt hours of batteries to deliver 30 megawatts of continuous power at a target uptime of 99.3 percent, and the company says it can be profitable at 100 dollars per megawatt hour despite overbuilding both solar and storage. To reach that cost it manufactures its own battery packs from bought in cells, which it says carry about 1.3 times the cost of the bare cell against five to seven times for most stationary storage systems.