US firm to expand PH energy storage manufacturing
ILOILO CITY—Silicon Valley-based company Amber Kinetics is investing up to $300 million to build additional energy storage manufacturing plants in the Philippines and the United States.
Amber Kinetics president Edgar Chua said around $100 million would go to the Philippines.
“We are currently doing a fundraise both in the US and in the UK—so, London and New York essentially,” Chua said during the US Embassy in the Philippines’ 16th Media Seminar entitled Powering Progress: The Path Toward the Philippines’ Clean Energy Transition held here.
“And once we are successful in completing the fundraise, then we can already start the implementation of the plan,” he said.
Amber Kinetics has two manufacturing facilities located at economic zones in Batangas. It produces energy storage systems using ‘flywheel’ technology, which stores kinetic energy or energy in motion by a spinning steel rotor enclosed in a vacuum container.
To discharge the stored energy, the motor switches to act as a generator to deliver electricity to end-users.
Chua said Amber Kinetics has identified a 4.5-hectare site to develop another factory, which is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2025.
“It used to be a Korean manufacturing facility, which shut down in October of last year, and we have identified it as an ideal site for us to put our third plant,” he said.
Outside the archipelago, Chua said the company intends to construct three plants in America and a smaller one in Australia in the next two years depending on the outcome of its fundraising activity.
