Bethesda-based defense contractor Lockheed Martin is better known for missiles than batteries, but it has purchased the assets of a company that’s developing pioneering energy storage technology.
Lockheed announced Monday it had purchased “substantially all of the assets” of Sun Catalytix Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., which specializes in energy-related technologies. The new operation will be known as Lockheed Martin Advanced Energy Storage, a wholly-owned subsidiary intended to complement Lockheed Martin’s existing energy management and efficiency programs.
A spinoff of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab, Sun Catalytix has been developing a type of battery, called a flow battery, which could store multiple hours of power for power grids that rely on wind and solar energy. Those power systems lose energy when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun sets.
Sun Catalytix officials say their batteries would be different from existing flow batteries because they would rely on materials that are abundant and inexpensive.
The technology would be “affordable, durable, safe and scalable,” Lockheed Martin said in a press release.
Sun Catalytix told MIT Technology Review last year that its battery would store energy for less than half the cost of current grid batteries.
Then-U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu visited the Sun Catalytix facilities in 2012, when the company was touting plans to use sunlight and water to produce renewable energy by way of a sort of artificial leaf.” That technology was meant to strip hydrogen from water to power hydrogen engines.
The flow battery is a spinoff of the artificial leaf project.
“So far they’ve built kilowatt-scale devices, and are aiming for megawatts,” the website IEEE Spectrum reported last year when Sun Catalytix appeared at a Washington technology showcase of federal grant recipients.
Terms of the sale were not disclosed.
Lockheed Martin employs 113,000 people worldwide. Sales last year totaled $45.4 billion.