Offgrid Energy Labs opens UK's first ZincGel® battery manufacturing facility
The launch follows the Series A funding the company secured in late 2025 and is an important step in its plan to significantly scale its operations in the UK. ZincGel® is designed to store energy across a 6-to-16-hour discharge range and will handle 100% depth of discharge every day for 20 years. Critically, it contains no flammable material, meaning the thermal-runaway failure mechanism behind every major lithium-ion BESS fire does not exist in this chemistry, opening the door to safe deployment in data centres, hospitals and other commercial and industrial buildings. The company's technology is protected by more than 60 patents filed across the UK, EU, India and the United States.
Government cost-savings and improved energy security
This comes at a time of acute need for this technology in the UK, with Government paying £1.46 billion to curtail around 10 TWh of surplus wind generation in 2025 (up 22% year on year), a cost industry forecasters expect could climb towards £8 billion a year by 2030 in the absence of large-scale, long-duration storage to capture that energy.
Deployment of ZincGel® batteries will also create improved energy security for the UK. ZincGel® uses zinc and bromine, globally abundant commodities, removing the geopolitical exposure to lithium, cobalt and nickel. By providing balancing capacity that can substitute for gas peakers and other fossil-fuel flexibility, wider deployment is also intended to reduce the UK's overall reliance on fossil fuels while strengthening domestic supply-chain resilience.
A model that will revitalise UK manufacturing
Rather than concentrating value on a single megasite, Offgrid's distributed, partnership-based model spreads economic activity across dozens of UK SMEs, including injection moulders, chemical blenders, polymer compounders, and electronics and fabrication specialists. The company estimates UK SME contract spend of £35-80 million per GWh[2] of annual production, and total UK economic activity of £50-100 million per GWh, of which 70-80% flows directly to UK suppliers. At Offgrid’s planned scale of 10 GWh of annual production, that implies £500 million to £1 billion a year of recurring activity for UK SMEs, supporting an estimated 30-60 supplier businesses and several thousand skilled jobs across the Midlands, Teesside and the North-West.
Rishi Srivastava, Co-Founder of Offgrid Energy Labs, said: "For the first time, the UK can make its own batteries without depending on materials or supply chains we don't control. ZincGel® is built for the way Britain needs to store energy, which is over long durations, every day, and safely, with a manufacturing model that puts value back into the communities that have waited longest for industrial renewal. Hook is where we prove the product and lay the foundation for the huge scale we intend to build here in the UK.”
Tejas Kusurkar, Co-Founder of Offgrid Energy Labs, added: "ZincGel®'s six-to-sixteen-hour storage duration and inherent safety make it commercially attractive for data centres to use it to balance demand, industry to cut on-site energy costs, and the grid to avoid wasting wind and solar."
