What is Inenergy – Kommersant

Inenergy LLC was founded in 2013 and has been known on the market for many years as a “startup in the field of hydrogen energy”. In particular, since 2016, the structure of the Topaz Research Center LLC has become a resident of Skolkovo and has been developing fuel cells, having received more than 5.7 million rubles. support, according to the Skolkovo website. The NTI Fund first entered the capital of Topaz in 2020, receiving a share of 12.9%, and by 2023 increased the stake to 27.47%. In 2022, the company’s revenue amounted to 670 thousand rubles, gross profit – 352 thousand rubles, and net loss – 1.08 million rubles.

In 2021, against the background of the growing popularity of hydrogen energy, the state corporation Rosnano became interested in the developments of Inenergy. The structure of Rosnano LLC Hydrogen Energy entered the capital of Inenergy on February 18, 2022, receiving 15% in the company. But in the summer of 2022, after the imposition of sanctions, the Russian Federation actually lost the Western markets for hydrogen. In the spring of 2023, Rosnano withdrew from the Inenergy project. Since April 5, Gazprombank has become a new shareholder of the company through LLC N2 Invest (a structure of ZPIF Gazprombank – Long-term investments). The H2 Invest stake is 25.1%, the remaining 74.9% of Inenergy belongs to Alexei Kashin and is pledged to H2 Invest. Inenergy did not publish financial statements for 2021-2022.

In Russia, there is not a single serial manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries in a full cycle and using their own technology. The largest player could be Rosatom, which by 2025 plans to build a full-cycle gigafactory in Kaliningrad using South Korean technology for about 50 billion rubles. Inenergy says that they have been developing their own developments in the field of electrochemical energy sources for more than ten years, and in recent years they have been “actively developing the SNE direction based on metal-ion technologies (lithium and sodium) and flowing redox energy storage,” says Alexey Kashin.

RusHydro told Kommersant that they are testing one 30 kWh drive from Inenergy as part of a prototype hybrid drive. After trial operation, it is planned to confirm the design parameters and eliminate shortcomings, and then the drive must be tested in real conditions. Rosseti told Kommersant that one of their subsidiaries installed seven SNEs from Inenergy with a total energy intensity of 490 kWh. Accumulators provide uninterrupted power supply to socially significant facilities and the reliability of the network during peak hours.

In Russia, there are many laboratory developments of SNE technologies, but they still need to be “brought to mind,” Kommersant sources say on the market. The main difficulty is scaling up the development and creating a full-fledged technology for industrial mass production, confirms Mikhail Lifshits, Chairman of the Board of Directors of ROTEK (owns the manufacturer of storage systems TEEMP). In addition, many materials for the production of drives in the Russian Federation are not localized (including thin perforated aluminum foil for applying the cathode and anode and special polymer films), so you have to buy them in friendly countries. Difficulties can also arise in the production of cathode and anode materials of the required quality.

Polina Smertina